Hi, OK, I know enough has already been discussed on this topic and I think that I'm just not able to put pieces in place. So I understand the basic difference between an initrd (having a filesystem on a block /loopback device and mounting it on a ramdisk) and initramfs (Having a compressed cpio archieve included in the kernel image and weaving a file system directly on RAM to see the contents of this cpio). I assume this discussion is not limited to x86 architectures and initrd / initram fs can be used on all the other architectures also? 1) Firstly, are initramfs and initrd mutually exclusive techniques to achieve the same goal (providing initial drivers)? Does enabling one disable the other OR they complement / help each other? Conceptually, the former should be true, but browsing through the kernel config, the latter seems true. 2) The initrd image CANNOT be combined with kernel image to produce a single image, and the initramfs image cannot be seperated out from kernel image and later provided at boot time as a separate image, right? 3) I understand in case of initramfs, kernel does everything including loading of initramfs image (since it is included in kernel image only). But in case of initrd image, who loads the initrd image into memory? The bootloader I assume ... Because grub and lilo have a "initrd" line in their config file. But then how is it communicated to the kernel where in RAM (at which address) is the initrd loaded? 4) How about non-X86 architectures that don't have lilo / grub? Who loads initrd image into memory in that case and how is it communicated to kernel? 5) What does the "initrd=" kernel command line parameter mean, and is it applicable only for x86? 6) Is there a unified way of loading initrd on all architectures? Most of the online text suggestes to make entry into lilo or grub, which are not available else where... Thanks & Best Regards, Rajat Jain -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
