On Sat, 2003-03-22 at 14:04, Adrian Golumbovici wrote: > I saw that some compiled kernels include such a file in the /boot directory > and also include it in lilo, but others don't put any initrd in the /boot > directory and also I find no initrd section for them in the lilo. Despite > the lack of initrd, those kernels still boot and work ok. Can someone > explain me what is exactly the initrd and why some kernels work without it? >
initrd is a way of getting around the problem of needing a particular module before the root filesystem is loaded. In other words, say that you need a particular SCSI driver to access your hard disk. The driver, or module, is located somewhere in /lib/modules/ but of course, you can't access the drive until you load the module. initrd is a way of preloading these necessary modules before the rest of the filesystem comes online. That's all. I generally prefer to just build in these modules statically into the kernel rather than using initrd.
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