On Fri, 9 Sep 2011 13:41:07 +0200, Alex Schuster wrote about Re: [gentoo-user] /dev/sda* missing at boot:
> David W Noon writes:
>
> > The more I think about this merge of / and /usr, the dumber I think
> > the idea is. As I wrote in an earlier message on this list, the
> > initramfs will be many times larger than the kernel itself.
> > Indeed, my /boot partition is only 32 MiB, and that will be too
> > small to contain all the extra libraries and programs to run the
> > initramfs script.
>
> Here, I only need 2.2 M for the kernel, 1.7 M for System.map, and 3.5
> M for the initramfs.
My kernels are even smaller than yours: around 1.8MiB; and I have no
initramfs at all -- currently.
The problem is the initramfs will bloat out significantly once large
run-time libraries are required for early housekeeping, such as fsck
for various types of filesystem. In particular, the old e2fsck.static
program has been dropped from e2fspprogs (about 3 years ago) and we now
have the following:
dwn@karnak ~ % ldd /sbin/e2fsck
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xb7832000)
libext2fs.so.2 => /lib/libext2fs.so.2 (0xb77c1000)
libcom_err.so.2 => /lib/libcom_err.so.2 (0xb77bd000)
libblkid.so.1 => /lib/libblkid.so.1 (0xb7798000)
libuuid.so.1 => /lib/libuuid.so.1 (0xb7793000)
libe2p.so.2 => /lib/libe2p.so.2 (0xb778b000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0xb7604000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0xb75ea000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7833000)
As you can see, the fsck utility for ext2/3/4 filesystems requires
glibc and libpthread, as well as its smaller custom libraries. Putting
all the run-time libraries into the initramfs will make it both large
and a maintenance chore.
What kind of libraries do you have inside your initramfs?
--
Regards,
Dave [RLU #314465]
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dwn...@ntlworld.com (David W Noon)
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