Initrd: Difference between revisions

An initrd is simply a file containing some sort of minimalistic filesystem (if it can be called so). That filesystem totally depends on the Operating system and its version, but it is usually some archive format (compressed or not) such as [[tar]], which has the advantage of being very simple to generate using the ''tar'' command, a simplistic filesystem such as [[SFS]], or just a custom format. The good news is that this custom filesystem can be very simple: in fact, it doesn't need the complications of usual filesystems, such as addition, modification or deletion of files, and the parsing logic has to be very simple: you don't want your kernel to spend 5 minutes reading the initrd on each boot, do you ? [http://www.jamesmolloy.co.uk/tutorial_html/8.-The%20VFS%20and%20the%20initrd.html JamesM's tutorials] describe the development of a VFS and of an initrd.