Linux boot sequence includes many stages. Following the BIOS initialisation, the boot loader is being called (GRUB or GRUB-EFI), then GRUB does its magic, and then it loads the kernel and the init RAM FS (initramfs or initrd) to memory. Following that, the kernel is jumped to, and a set of scripts are called from…
Modern Kernel specification (can be seen here) defined the initial ramdisk (initrd or initramfs, depends on who you ask) to allow stacking of compressed or uncompressed CPIO archives. It means, in fact, that you can extend your current initramfs by appending a cpio.gz (or cpio) file at the end, containing the additions or changes to…
Just to remember, there is an explanation here, from which the following directive can be taken: (cpio -id; zcat | cpio -id) < /path/to/initrd.img
Warning: This is not the recommended method if you’re not sure you know what you’re doing. Linux Initial Ram Disk (initrd) is a mechanism to perform disk-independent actions before attempting to mount the ‘/’ disk. These actions usually include loading disk drivers, setting up LVM or software RAID, etc. The reason these actions are performed within initrd…
Boel initrd files are actually compressed cramfs files. This is a menuscript for authoring and modifying these files, if needed. Assume the file in question is /tftpboot/install-initrd-i386.img: cp /tftpboot/install-initrd-i386.img /tmp/ cd /tmp/ gzip -S .img -d install-initrd-i386.img mount -o loop install-initrd-i386 /mnt mkdir initrd cd /mnt/ tar cf – . | (cd /tmp/initrd/ ; tar…
In my post just below, I have defined a set of tests to verify the possible cause of the tg3 problem. It had nothing to do with autoneg, and was fixed in RHEL 4 Update 4. That 32bit installer works correctly. One last thing to test – rebuild the installer initrd, and replace tg3 module…
