[PATCH] documentation: Documentation/initrd.txt

I spent a long time the other day trying to examine an initrd image on a
fedora core 5 system because the initrd.txt file is apparently obsolete.
Here is a patch which I hope will reduce future confusion for others.

Signed-off-by: Thomas Horsley <tom.horsley@ccur.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This commit is contained in:
Thomas Horsley 2006-07-30 03:04:12 -07:00 committed by Linus Torvalds
parent 5a06a363ef
commit 0a5eca6530

View file

@ -72,6 +72,22 @@ initrd adds the following new options:
initrd is mounted as root, and the normal boot procedure is followed,
with the RAM disk still mounted as root.
Compressed cpio images
----------------------
Recent kernels have support for populating a ramdisk from a compressed cpio
archive, on such systems, the creation of a ramdisk image doesn't need to
involve special block devices or loopbacks, you merely create a directory on
disk with the desired initrd content, cd to that directory, and run (as an
example):
find . | cpio --quiet -c -o | gzip -9 -n > /boot/imagefile.img
Examining the contents of an existing image file is just as simple:
mkdir /tmp/imagefile
cd /tmp/imagefile
gzip -cd /boot/imagefile.img | cpio -imd --quiet
Installation
------------