Modular initrd [was Re: [PATCH] mkinitrd rescue mode]

[Ville Herva]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 06:32:27PM +0200, you [Arjan van de Ven] wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-08-17 at 11:52 -0400, Loris Santamaria wrote:
> > What about a modular initrd, similar to what is fond in Debian? 
> 
> how about something slightly different...
> 
> 2.6 kernel initrd's are cpio archives. And the kernelm supports catting
> multiple of these together and the kernel then untars then one after
> another...
> 
> soo... all that's needed is having a /boot/initrd.local image that
> mkinitrd always appends to the initrd it creates.. and inside that image
> you can do what you want.
> 
> And then maybe some tool to create that initrd.local from some dir or
> something.

[I think that was proposed in the thread I rudely revived from the grave. I
think there was some uncertainty on whether it actually works, but I gather
it *is* supposed to.]

Yes, to me that sounds excellent. The baseline initrd init script would
probably need some hooks to trigger the add-on functionality, but perhaps
that much extra complexity can be tolerated? (Unless the add-on cpio always
overwrites the original init script, but I don't think that's a maintanable
solution.)



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