On 08/01/16 03:03, Marco d'Itri wrote: > It has been said that some have[citation needed] crappy boot loaders > that do not support loading an initramfs, but you can still embed one in > the kernel binary if you are building your own kernel
... and you'd need to build your own kernel on these platforms in any case, because Debian kernels (like those in most distributions) are heavily modularized, and can't see a disk or mount the root filesystem without help from user-space anyway (CONFIG_SATA_AHCI=m, CONFIG_EXT4_FS=m and the equivalents for other drive interfaces and filesystems). tiny-initramfs, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, seems an excellent candidate for embedding in a kernel that doesn't need a "full-fat" initramfs: it's around 16K when statically linked to a small libc, and is configured via the kernel command-line (to mount the root) and the root's /etc/fstab (to mount /usr if necessary). S