initramfs and where user space truly begins

Posted Jul 13, 2006 5:07 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333)
Parent article: initramfs and where user space truly begins

As far as I am concerned initramfs kicks-ass.

It's finally a initrd thing I can understand. I can add my own scripts and do my own thing and it's not a huge deal.

For instance I wanted to have my flash drive show up as /dev/flashdrive and it's partitions as /dev/flashdrive1 and /dev/flashdrive2.

This is because on different machines it would show up differently. Some machines had it as /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 and others with SATA drives would have it show up as /dev/sdb or c or d. This was very important problem becuase I installed Debian on flashdrive for booting machines up so I could carry around a linux system with me for surfing the web or doing rescue stuff or whatever.

I tried initially to reference the thing using it's volume label, but that was not a total solution. It didn't work always as the /dev/disk stuff just was a symbolic link to /dev/sd*. Also I didn't want it to change the order of how the drives was detected. If the harddrives showed up as /dev/sda I wanted to make sure that they stayed that way.

editing the initramfs scripts in my own inept way made it simple for me to work around the various small issues that cropped up when trying to have a single root file system and initrd image boot up every computer that I happenned to come across.

So next thing I am going to do is use squashfs and UnionFS and some custom scripts to make it so that I can compress the majority of the root file system to reclaim disk space and increase speed and yet keep it read-write.