Bug 199831

Summary:	initrd.txt hopelessly out of date
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Tom Horsley <horsley1953>
Component:	kernel	Assignee:	Dave Jones <davej>
Status:	CLOSED UPSTREAM	QA Contact:	Brian Brock <bbrock>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	5	CC:	pfrields, wtogami
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2006-07-26 03:50:19 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Tom Horsley 2006-07-23 00:46:27 UTC

Description of problem:

When attempting to figure out what was going on at boot time I wanted
to fiddle with the initrd image. The kernel doc file
Documentation/initrd.txt only talks about loopback devices and
filesystem images. Meanwhile, the files actually being used by
the kernel these days are simply compressed cpio archives. (A fact
only learned after much web searching).

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

kernel-doc-2.6.17

How reproducible:

always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. try to understand initrd images by reading kernel docs
  
Actual results:

Total confusion and misinformation.

Expected results:

Useful data :-).

Additional info:

Much web diving finally produced this command to examine an initrd
image:

gzip -cd ../old/initrd.img|cpio -imd --quiet

And this command to rebuild the image after modifying it:

find . | cpio --quiet -c -o | gzip -9 -n > ../initrd.img

They actually seemed to work. It would sure be handy if the initrd.txt
file mentioned those commands up front and then went on to the historical
information for older kernels it already contains.

Comment 1 Dave Jones 2006-07-26 03:50:19 UTC

send patches to linux-kernel.org