Initrd: Difference between revisions

Usually, initial ramdisks are used by [[Modular Kernel]]s and [[Microkernel]]s, which commonly face a chicken-or-egg problem at boot time: the kernel needs to load its modules from disk, but these modules include the driver that normally allows the kernel to access that disk (although this applies to any other media). An initrd is an elegant solution to this problem: the boot disk driver is stored within the initrd, which is loaded along with the kernel. Then, when the kernel boots, it retrieves the initrd in memory, loads the boot disk driver from it, and uses the freshly loaded driver to load the rest of its modules. This is the solution used by Linux (not the early versions), as well as many hobby OS'sOSes.