[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: [D-I] Supporting 2.6.14 kernels in base-installer



On dim, 2005-11-13 at 22:49 +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> > FWIW, Ubuntu's install defaults to 'most' mode on the grounds that for
> > most systems (not lowmem, not oldworld ppc, not netboot) there's no harm
> > in having a larger initramfs (approx 5 meg on disk, 40meg in memory).
> 
> A bit over 7MB on powerpc, i think.
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 6413337 2005-10-13 13:09 initrd.img-2.6.12-9-powerpc64-smp

This is on powerpc64.  My ppc32 system isn't online at the moment, but
I'd expect it to be a bit less.

> > The upside is that the initramfs created should be more or less
> > identical for every system and is resilient against people moving the
> > drive from one machine to the other, doing perfect copies (using ghost,
> > dd, or whatnot), or using an already generated initramfs to recover
> > broken systems on other machines.
> > 
> > I'd argue for keeping that mode as default if possible because there
> > isn't any benefit to the smaller initramfs in 95% of cases, and it
> > increases the risk of a non-booting system.
> 
> I wonder about one thing though, since this is basically a ramdisk, once the
> boot is over, what happens to the memory used to hold it ? 
It gets freed as part of run-init, which goes through and rm's
everything on the ramdisk to cause it to be returned to the system.

Tks,
Jeff Bailey




Reply to: