F3 initrd strangeness

[Alistair]

On Mon, 2004-12-06 at 17:10 -0700, Orion Poplawski wrote:
> T. Horsnell (tsh) wrote:
> > I'm having problems building a diskless net-bootable FC3 kernel,
> > and decided to take a look inside the vanilla initrd file
> > initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img. However, if I gunzip this and try
> > to mount it, the mount fails:
> > Can anyone else successfully mount their FC3 initrd?
> > Any ideas what may be stopping me?
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > Terry.
> > 
> 
> With FC3 (actually, with some version of mkinitrd) the initrd is an 
> "initramfs" image:
> 
> # gunzip -c initrd-2.6.9-1.681_FC3.img > initrd-2.6.9-1.681_FC3.raw
> # file initrd-2.6.9-1.681_FC3.raw
> initrd-2.6.9-1.681_FC3.raw: ASCII cpio archive (SVR4 with no CRC)
> 
> So, it's a cpio archive now.
> 
> Note that the kernel can still handle the old initrd images as well.
> 
That also explains my earlier query about appending a DSDT image to the
initrd.  This mechanism, which is very convenient for those developing a
new DSDT, appears to be precluded in FC3 - or will, at least, have to be
substantially revised.

Alistair