Arch Linux

kowalski

Member

Registered: 2009-05-07

Posts: 82

Including initrd image in kernel

Hi,

first of all I hope this is right forum section for this post, otherwise please move it.

The beginner's guide (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beg … tcpio.conf) states that one can include the image generated by mkinitcpio in the kernel to have a "self-contained" kernel. What would one benefit from if doing so? Decreased boot time? I mean the time delay between loading the initrd and mounting the root filesystem is easily 10 seconds on my machine.

I've done some googling on this issue but wasn't able to come up with anything related. The man page of mkinitcpio doesn't give me any hints either. So, how do address this matter or am I missing something obvious?!

Any hints are more than welcome.

Thanks & Cheers

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He who says A doesn't have to say B. He can also recognize that A was false.

Ber

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2006-07-05

Posts: 80

Website

Re: Including initrd image in kernel

I don't think it would change much, for me it's just a matter of binaries packaging (either way you have to load everything to ram, wether you do it by loading one big binary or 2 small ones shouldn't make any difference).  It will definitely not speed up your boot process (10 seconds to mount your *real* root is a lot, do you have special hardware?).

As I see it, it can be useful when deploying this kernel over multiple machines to only have one file that contains everything...

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