Diskless boot

Jeremy Katz katzj at redhat.com
Thu Sep 30 20:14:37 UTC 2004


On Thu, 2004-09-30 at 21:15 +0100, Jonathan Andrews wrote:
> Am I chasing my tail ? I used to boot sparcs like this by passing an IP
> and nfsroot as the kernel arguments, yet every example I find for fedora
> uses an initrd image with modules in it. Isn't it simpler to waste a few
> extra kbytes and have a kernel with most common ethernet and NFS
> compiled in.
> 
> I notice a diskless kernel and initrd image in fedora, but its seems to
> be just an installer, the kernel boots on most things - but remove the
> initrd and it doesn't stand alone ?

The upstream kernel is moving towards removing these sorts of things.
It's far easier to do them in userspace and just have everything
modular.  

And with initramfs[1] if you, for some strange reason, can only load one
file, you can cat the initramfs to the end of your kernel image.  I'd
recommend using a boot loader like pxelinux, though, to make things
simpler.

Jeremy

[1] Note that mkinitrd now creates an initramfs image if you're on a 2.6
kernel, the name notwithstanding




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