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What's initramfs do now?What's initramfs do now?Posted Dec 5, 2012 20:51 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: What's initramfs do now? by dlang Parent article: Gentoo's udev fork
Err... the software can't get out of sync because initramfses are built at kernel build time from the software *already on* your system. (Normally. Obviously you can choose to do something else, but that would be strange.)
It lets you customize things that are otherwise uncustomizable -- personally I consider this a good thing. Obviously it's not essential, but it's not some monstrous terrible hugely complex destabilizing thing either. The smallest possible /init is probably less than ten lines of shell script, and most of that is getting a useful /dev to do a mount from.
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What's initramfs do now? Posted Dec 5, 2012 22:01 UTC (Wed) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647) [Link]
> Err... the software can't get out of sync because initramfses are built at kernel build time from the software *already on* your system.
How does that keep things in sync? When you update the software on your system, you need to remember to rebuild the initramfs too. Likewise with changing any configuration files that are found in both, like /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf. I've been bitten by forgetting to run "update-initramfs -u" after changing that file.
What's initramfs do now? Posted Dec 5, 2012 22:19 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Oh, yeah, sure, if you have config files in an initramfs linked into the kernel, and they change, you're stuffed. I just never ever do that: the only config files in my initramfs are /etc/fstab and /etc/mdadm.conf, and they're just there to default values for the array to activate and root filesystem to mount: a few lines of shell and bingo they're overrideable from the kernel command line. That sort of thing changes much less often than the kernel itself, though, so I consider a linked-in initramfs still preferable because it lets you bisect, test kernels and the like, which is one thing a standalone initramfs or initrd *does* make harder.
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