Messages in this thread Patch in this message | | | Subject | patch for Documentation/initrd.txt? | From | Tom Horsley <> | Date | Thu, 27 Jul 2006 09:17:04 -0400 |
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I spend hours the other day trying to examine a fedora core 5 initrd file in the mistaken belief that the Documentation/initrd.txt file might contain relevant information :-). It didn't, but many web searches later I finally discovered the new key to decrypting initrd files. Would it be possible to add the attached patch (or a better one if someone can explain things in more detail) to the initrd.txt file to avoid future confusion? Thanks. --- linux-2.6.17.7/Documentation/initrd.txt 2006-07-27 08:49:30.000000000 -0400 +++ linux-2.6.17.7/Documentation/initrd.txt 2006-07-27 09:02:04.000000000 -0400 @@ -73,6 +73,22 @@ initrd is mounted as root, and the normal boot procedure is followed, with the RAM disk still mounted as root. +Compressed cpio images +---------------------- + +Recent kernels have support for populating a ramdisk from a compressed cpio +archive, on such systems, the creation of a ramdisk image doesn't need to +involve special block devices or loopbacks, you merely create a directory on +disk with the desired initrd content, cd to that directory, and run (as an +example): + +find . | cpio --quiet -c -o | gzip -9 -n > /boot/imagefile.img + +Examining the contents of an existing image file is just as simple: + +mkdir /tmp/imagefile +cd /tmp/imagefile +gzip -cd /boot/imagefile.img | cpio -imd --quiet Installation ------------ | |