From: Thomas Horsley Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2006 10:04:12 +0000 (-0700) Subject: [PATCH] documentation: Documentation/initrd.txt X-Git-Tag: v2.6.18-rc4~85 X-Git-Url: https://err.no/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?a=commitdiff_plain;h=0a5eca6530eb4d0120981936058537c24a2f92ce;p=linux-2.6 [PATCH] documentation: Documentation/initrd.txt 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 Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- diff --git a/Documentation/initrd.txt b/Documentation/initrd.txt index b1b6440237..15f1b35deb 100644 --- a/Documentation/initrd.txt +++ b/Documentation/initrd.txt @@ -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 ------------