Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
[PATCH] documentation: Documentation/initrd.txt
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
I spent a long time the other day trying to examine an initrd image on a
fedora core 5 system because the initrd.txt file is apparently obsolete.
Here is a patch which I hope will reduce future confusion for others.

Signed-off-by: Thomas Horsley <tom.horsley@ccur.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
  • Loading branch information
Thomas Horsley authored and Linus Torvalds committed Jul 31, 2006
1 parent 5a06a36 commit 0a5eca6
Showing 1 changed file with 16 additions and 0 deletions.
16 changes: 16 additions & 0 deletions Documentation/initrd.txt
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -72,6 +72,22 @@ initrd adds the following new options:
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
------------
Expand Down

0 comments on commit 0a5eca6

Please sign in to comment.