on Sun, Oct 29, 2000 at 09:30:38PM -0800, Krzys Majewski (majewski@cs.ubc.ca) wrote: > My distribution has an empty directory /initrd. What is it? "initial RAM disk". When booting a kernel image, it's sometimes necessary to access additional features, almost always kernel modules and a utility to load them, which 1). aren't compiled into the kernel (say, a stock kernel), and 2). can't be read from the primary root filesystem because of a dependency deadlock with these features. The solution is to create a small filesystem image with just the tools necessary to get you through the boot sequence. This is loaded as a RAM disk, then saved to /initrd after boot, presumably so that you can examine its contents in the event of any problems. I've used an initrd in the distant past, when I was dual-booting GNU/Linux and NT. Actually, it was a triple boot, with the NT bootloader being the primary, DOS being a boot option from this, and LOADLIN.EXE being an option on an DOS boot menu. LOADLIN would bring up a kernel which didn't have SCSI support, so I created an initrd with the appropriate modules to bring up my GNU/Linux installation. Cool hat trick. Not often used these days. See lilo and kernel sources documentation for more information. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://www.netcom.com/~kmself Evangelist, Opensales, Inc. http://www.opensales.org What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org
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