On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 06:23:04PM +0300, Andrei Popescu wrote: > On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 11:10:25PM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote: > > Miles Bader wrote: > > > Hmm, I didn't realize it analyzed the system when building the ramfs > > > contents. Maybe I could just reinstall the kernel while the new kernel > > > is running (or is there an official "hint" mechanism I could use)? > > > > Yes. Please try that. > > > > > [I thought it just included _every_ possible module on the ramfs -- > > > judging from the enormous size of the installed kernel package, it seems > > > like it!] > > > > :-) > > Yes, I know what you mean. I was using yaird to make my initrd, but it > gave some errors on the latest upgrade (and Steve Langasek, Debian > kernel maintainer suggested it is no longer maintained). So now I'm > exploring the initramfs-tools package. The first initrd was about *5 > (five)* times bigger! wow! I never noticed that. And in fact I probably wouldn't have as this system doesn't have any initrd's left from yaird. My server which was an etch/testing box for a while has a couple older initrd's that are 1.4 megs or so versus the newer ones at 5-6megs. yikes. I changed the config for including modules from > 'most' to 'dep' and I got a much smaller (but still a bit bigger then > yaird) initrd. Haven't tried to boot with it yet, though ;) same here. interesting. I'll have to play with that. You could probably tighten it up even more by using the 'list' option and putting a minimum-necessary list in /etc/initramfs-tools/modules. At least that's how I read it. So what is the significance of initrd size? (other than the obvious filling up /boot issue). Is it really a problem to have "most" modules in there? I can think of some situations where it might be nice to have most of them -- mobo fails catastrophically and you want to be able to just boot, for example. Finally, I have on this (sid) system both initrd-tools and initramfs-tools installed. The latter is brought in by the kernel dependencies, and the former is manually installed. Who knows why or when I did that, but is one preferred over the other? A
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