On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 10:21:23PM +0200, Thibaut VARENE wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Hi, > > I was wondering why are we using initd on installed debian kernels. > > Let me explain myself: I can perfectly understand that initrd is needed > for d-i, but, when I recently updated an x86 woody box to testing, > upgrading its kernel to 2.4.26 debian, I noticed that the initrd thingy > was installed (got the nice warning about lilo). > > I didn't pay much attention to that at that time, knowing it was the > new default for debian kernels. But, I started giggling when I realized > the total boot time (time before first login prompt) of the box was > almost tripled (that's a P2 400). > > So here comes my suggestion: why not having a specific kernel deb for > d-i *with* (the one corresponding to the version selected for the > stable installer), and the rest of the kernel debs *without* initrd, as > they used to be? That implies that d-i would have to install a > non-initrd kernel, obviously.
Well, we almost reached 4Mo of compressed kernel image on powerpc with the non-initrd thingy, and it broke on some subarches (like prep). So there is obiously a limit to the non-initrd kernels. Maybe you just need to build your own non-initrd kernel, don't you ? You just take the kernel-source and config of the debian kernel, unmodularize what you know you will want (mostly filesystem and ide modules probably) and build the resulting kernel. Friendly, Sven Luther
