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Discover the Anatomy of initrd

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the oh-you-clever-pr-people dept.

IdaAshley writes "The Linux initial RAM disk (initrd) is a temporary root file system that is mounted during system boot to support the two-state boot process. It contains various executables and drivers that permit the real root file system to be mounted, after which the initrd RAM disk is unmounted and its memory freed. In this article explore the initial RAM disk for Linux 2.6, including its creation and use in the Linux kernel. In many embedded Linux systems, the initrd is the final root file system."

2 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. More More More!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    More of these types of articles on Slashdot, please. This is "News I Can Use".



    Stick to our techie roots.

  2. Re:Options for fast booting by LiquidFire_HK · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't know much about it, either, but I will attempt to answer your question.

    Most of the boot time is "wasted" in loading modules into memory, loading needed services (daemons, scripts to set up the environment, etc.). The time required to load up the initrd image is minimal, and few other things are "created" during boot (maybe /dev device nodes, but I think those are also saved in a tarball).

    What you are proposing would offer little speed increase: you still have to load everything into memory. And if you propose saving what's in memory to an image to be loaded on boot, this already exists.