my system uses devfs and kernel 2.19.something, but I don't think it uses an initrd (there is no initrd specification in the grub boot line).
devfs is way cool once you start to grok it and get it set up how you want. I'm not an expert, but setting up my gentoo system with it has taught me a bit about setting permissions on devices and so on. Do you need to use an initrd. I understand that it is used to insert modules needed for booting, eg if you want to mount a scsi device as /, but you only have the scsi device driver as a module. It gets around that chicken and egg scenario where your driver module is in /lib/modules, but you cannot mount / until your driver module is loaded.... So is there any reason you can't compile in whatever drivers you need? (yes i know its frustrating trying to get something to work and not knowing why it won't!!) On Tue, 25 Feb 2003 18:33:41 -0800 "G. M. Bodnar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I was playing around on the weekend with kernels and I decided to try to > run devfs and use initrd during the boot process. It didn't work, and > I'm left wondering why. It's not overly critical, but I hate it when I > can't figure out why it doesn't work. > > Has anyone run into similar problems or gotten this combination to work > on a 2.4.20 kernel? The kernel source isn't vanilla, though. It's a > debian kernel source package with lowlatency and preempt patches (which > shouldn't affect things at boot up.) The kernel boots fine, but panics > when it can't mount the root partition (ext3, hda2) to run /sbin/init. > Support for ext3 is compiled in, and works fine as long as I'm not using > initrd. > > I've looked through /linuxrc on the initrd image, and nothing strikes me > as wrong, but this is the first time I've looked at it. > > Comments? Pointers? > > --- - >
