Initramfs arrives

Initramfs arrives

"RAM-based disk" is an unfortunate term--ramfs is not based on a block device at all--it's just a tree of dentries/inodes in memory, so there's nothing in there that looks like a disk. It's significantly simpler and more space-efficient than a ramdisk, since you're not duplicating data between the RD block device and the dentry and inode caches. I see it as conceptually cleaner as well, since you don't have to have any particular filesystem drivers loaded when early userspace starts up...