Benedict Verheyen wrote:
Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:Good point. So what's the reason that debian kernel images come with an initrd? An example I can think of is vesafb: in order for that to be used it must be either builtin or in initrd. Right?H.The kernels Debian provides need to run on a broad number of machines hence the useof an initrd which loads the modules needed for a particular machine. Benedict
Exactly. Vesafb is not really the best example--it's there, but the initrd's job is to get your root filesystem mounted. I believe you can still use vesafb as a module without it being in the initrd, it just gets loaded later in the boot process. If we take a look at a stock debian kernel's initrd, we'd see modules for ide disk drives, raid arrays, scsi disk drives, tons of filesystems, and a bunch of miscellaneous drivers. Without an initrd to give the kernel access to these modules, they would all have to be built in leaving all users with a gigantic kernel with many unneeded built-in features.
Michael Spang