Arch Linux

lanrat

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2003-10-28

Posts: 1,274

customizing initrd

I've recently bought a new laptop Toshiba Satellite Pro M40x-169

Naturally I've cut down win xp ntfs partition and installed arch using 0.7.1-pre1 cd. Everything worked great so far (much better than I expected because I had no experience with linux on notebooks before). 

Since the cd is using 2.6.14 kernel the standard initrd loads gazillion of modules which I don't need. Reducing number of needed modules using mkinitrd.conf, lspci/lshwd/hwd (all with updated hardware databases) + the newest tpowa's tool hwdetect helped a lot (and I didn't even have to use initrd-full :-)).

But there are still some modules I don't need (I think) and I'm seeking your advice how to disable them.
The hardisk is recognized as sata (everything is intel based):

ata1: dev 0 cfg 49:0f00 82:746b 83:7fe8 84:6023 85:f469 86:3c48 87:6023 88:203f
ata1: dev 0 ATA, max UDMA/100, 78140160 sectors: lba48
ata1(0): applying bridge limits
ata1: dev 0 configured for UDMA/100
scsi0 : ata_piix
  Vendor: ATA       Model: HTS424040M9AT00   Rev: MA2O
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 05
SCSI device sda: 78140160 512-byte hdwr sectors (40008 MB)
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
SCSI device sda: 78140160 512-byte hdwr sectors (40008 MB)
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
 sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 < sda5 sda6 >
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0x18B8 irq 15
ata2: dev 0 cfg 49:0f00 82:0000 83:0000 84:0000 85:0000 86:0000 87:0000 88:0407
ata2: dev 0 ATAPI, max UDMA/33
ata2: dev 0 configured for UDMA/33
scsi1 : ata_piix

I still haven't configured rest of the modules for video etc. in /etc/rc.conf except network to make it easier to read.

This is my current mkinitrd.conf (comments removed):

REMOVE_IDE=
REMOVE_SCSI=
REMOVE_SATA=
REMOVE_CDROM=
REMOVE_USB=1
REMOVE_FW=1
REMOVE_RAID=1
REMOVE_CRYPT=1
REMOVE_FS=

HOSTCONTROLLER_IDE="generic"
HOSTCONTROLLER_SCSI="ahci"
HOSTCONTROLLER_SATA="ata_piix"
HOSTCONTROLLER_USB=
FILESYSTEMS="reiserfs ext3"
CRYPT_DEVICE=

ADD_MODULE=
REMOVE_MODULE="ide_floppy"

Current lsmod output:

Module                  Size  Used by
8139too                25216  0
mii                     5120  1 8139too
usbcore               115584  1
ext3                  133640  1
jbd                    58132  1 ext3
reiserfs              270064  1
ata_piix                7684  3
sr_mod                 15652  0
ahci                    9988  0
libata                 44936  2 ata_piix,ahci
sd_mod                 15488  4
ide_floppy             18176  0
ide_cd                 39812  0
cdrom                  38688  2 sr_mod,ide_cd
ide_disk               16128  0
generic                 4356  0 [permanent]
ide_core              119376  4 ide_floppy,ide_cd,ide_disk,generic

I forgot to add piix to HOSTCONTROLLER_IDE as advised in the wiki but it works :-) (is this module really needed?)

Nootebook is equipped with cdrw/dvd combo. No floppy. I tried to get rid of ide_floppy module using REMOVE_MODULE but it didn't work as you can see. There is no HOSTCONTROLLER_CDROM too.

Can I (how?) get rid of or reduce the number of these the modules in initrd?:
usbcore
sr_mod
sd_mod
ide_floppy
ide_cd
ide_disk

T-Dawg

Forum Fellow

From: Charlotte, NC

Registered: 2005-01-29

Posts: 2,736

Re: customizing initrd

usbcore is loaded from rc.sysinit:

# Load USB support
/sbin/modprobe usbcore >/dev/null 2>&1

Not sure why ide_floppy is loading...