On 5/16/05, Jesse Keating <jkeating@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (4) no longer support booting > from floppy disks. Since 1.4M is no longer the max size what is the new max size that we will allow the initrd to be? I'm asking this because there is a lot of masochistic code in the initrd and now that we don't use boot floppies, it may not be needed any more. It would be cool to put a small busy box shell in the initrd so that you could have a shell prompt right away. You could use this to modprobe drivers and type lspci and basically manually fix things the same as you do in other busy box boot environments. At work we have a hacked up initrd so that we can put driver disks directly into the initrd. A lot of systems don't have a floppy or cdrom and if it's a scsi driver you can't store it on the drive. These days I guess everyone would use USB, but that's slow and hands on where our solution is awesome and completely automated. There are probably other ways the initrd could be made more useful now that we don't have to deal with the 1.4M limit in the stock install. regards, dan carpenter
