Silly bootup question

[Mike Burger]

> Hey everyone,
> When a RHEL system is booting, in the messages you can see "Switching to
> new
> root." Can someone explain this part of the bootup process? What exactly
> is
> meant by "new root," is it simply another shell starting or what?
> -Matthew

Hi, Matthew.

When an RHEL (or any other Linux) boots, it starts up from a RAMdisk (see
/boot/initrd*), which contains enough of a filesystem grouping to boot the
system and perform initialization.

At a certain point, it goes ahead and mounts your actual root (/)
filesystem, at which point it spits out that message.

-- 
Mike Burger
http://www.bubbanfriends.org

Visit the Dog Pound II BBS
telnet://dogpound2.citadel.org or http://dogpound2.citadel.org

To be notified of updates to the web site, visit:

https://www.bubbanfriends.org/mailman/listinfo/site-update

or send a blank email message to:

site-update-subscribe at bubbanfriends.org