Moving F7

[Timothy Murphy]

Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:

>> I'm not certain about this, but I don't think you are right.
>> You are certainly wrong about the kernel,
>> which just comes with the kernel RPM.
>> But I think you are also wrong about initrd too -
>> that comes with the kernel RPM too, IIRC.
>> I don't think when a new kernel is installed mkinitrd is run.
>> 
> No, the initrd is generated as part of the kernel install scripts.
> It does not come with the kernel. This is because it has to match
> the hardware on your system. The initrd file on my laptop with a
> SATA drive is different from the one for my server with SCSI drives
> witch is different from the desktop with PATA drives witch is
> different from the one on my bootable USB drive. They are all
> created by mkinitrd when you install the kernel. Otherwise the
> initrd file would have to contain all the modules for disk access,
> or they would have to be built into the kernel.
> 
> You can verify this by looking at the install scripts in the kernel
> package. You can also check the dates on the kernel, and on the
> initrd image file. The kernel date/time will be earlier then the
> time/date on the initrd image. You can also run "rpm -Vv <kernel
> rpm> | grep /boot" - it will not try to verify the initrd file. You
> can run it without piping through the grep command, but then it list
> all the modules that come with the kernel too.

I see that you are right.
What misled me is that there _is_ an initrd in the kernel rpm:
[tim at elizabeth ~]$ rpm -ql kernel-2.6.22.5-76.fc7 | grep initrd
/boot/initrd-2.6.22.5-76.fc7.img
I guess this is used if mkinitrd fails for some reason.

Actually, the old kernels and modules I have from pre-SATA Fedora
do run under Fedora-7, I'm not sure why.
(I upgraded from FC-5 on one machine, so the old kernels are there.)