On 5/8/06, Arjan van de Ven <arjan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 2006-05-08 at 08:25 -0300, Jeronimo Zucco wrote: > Arjan van de Ven wrote: > >> May be this is caused by UDEV support. > > > > > > usually when this happens you forgot to use an initrd. > > The easiest way to do that is to just do "make install" as last step in > > building the kernel, that makes an initrd for you and also adds the > > kernel and initrd correctly to grub.conf > > And if you not want use initrd ? why don't you? Can you explain what you have against using an initrd?
I don't know what Jeronimo has against initrd's, but I can tell you what I have against them. An initrd complicates things. It's one more thing to remember to build. It's one more thing that can potentially break. If you just build into the kernel whatever you need to get to the point of mounting the root fs (or want to have available early) and then anything else you need as modules, then an initrd is pretty pointless, and it's a much more simple setup IMO.
Fedora requires an initrd for several parts; udev is one of them, mount-by-label another, selinux a third.
I'm not a Fedora user, so I don't know what initrd assumptions are build into it, but I've never had a need for an initrd with Slackware - I can build an use one if I want, sure, but it has never been a requirement in any way.
It's not like using an initrd has drawbacks that I know of, nor is it hard; if you use "make install" it's automatic as I said, and that's a convenient thing to use anyway (because it does the bootloader stuff for you)
Personally I consider "make install" dangerous. First of all it assumes that I want my kernel to be named /boot/vmlinuz and happily overwrites any previous kernel image that may exist by that name. So if my new kernel doesn't boot, and I only have that one entry in my lilo.conf, then I'm in trouble and have to go find a CD to boot from to recover. It's not like it's hard to manually copy System.map & bzImage to /boot under a unique name and add that new file to your bootloader - I'd say doing it by hand and keeping your old working kernel in place as a secondary option is a hell of a lot safer than just using "make install". -- Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@xxxxxxxxx> Don't top-post http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/top-post.html Plain text mails only, please http://www.expita.com/nomime.html -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
