On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 05:34:58AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > On Tue, 29 Sep 2009, Luciano Rocha wrote: > > > On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 04:39:48AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > > > > > > i'm still looking for how to keep the initrd mounted after > > > booting on my x86_64 system. can't you do that anymore? it's > > > been a while since i tried that, and i thought the kernel parm > > > "retain_initrd" would do it, and leave it mounted at /initrd. > > > apparently not. am i misremembering? is there a way? thanks. > > > > You're not misremembering, but you're also not considering that > > current distributions don't boot the system using initrd, only > > initramfs. The boot process then differs significantly. > > i don't agree. while all recent kernels will have an embedded > initramfs (the topic of my very next kernel newbie column, in fact), > unless you specifically populate that internal initramfs, it's going > to be virtually empty and you'll still end up using the external > initrd image supplied by grub. which means that you should still have > the ability to retain the initrd filesystem if you want. No. The initrd option in grub, and the similar one in other boot loaders, passes a binary image to the kernel. Then the kernel identifies it as an initramfs or as an initrd. When the kernel boots, you can see this message: Trying to unpack rootfs image as initramfs... Or similar, I think it was different in older kernels. I got this in an older one: checking if image is initramfs... it is The initrams contents are decompressed over the ones included in the kernel. Then the kernel checks if /init exists (or another one, passed with the option rdinit=path) and if it exists and is runnable, passes control to it even before trying to mount the root partition. Then the system is booted, and the /init binary is responsible for booting the rest of the system. The original image is no longer available, unless /init decides to do keep it somewhere else. If there's no executable /init, then the kernel continues as in the old case. -- Luciano Rocha <luciano@xxxxxxxxxxx> Eurotux Informática, S.A. <http://www.eurotux.com/>
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