From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.2.1) Gecko/20010901 Description of problem: from the source of the "mkinitrd" script, it seems that you have the flexibility, for options like --fstab and --with to either use an "=" sign or to leave it out: --with ext3 --with=ext3 this is because those cases search for patterns such as --fstab*) and --with*). however, the same is not true for the --preload option, which recognizes only --preload), and will fail if you use an "=", despite what the man page says. if you use an "=", the script will interpret what you've typed as a target, as in target=--preload=ext3. simple solution: add an asterisk in the case pattern for --preload, just as there is for --fstab and --with. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.mkinitrd -v --preload=ext3 /tmp/initrd.img 2.4.7-10 2. 3. Additional info:
pedantic point: the --image-version option is not mentioned in either the man page or info page, either.
and while i'm beating up on mkinitrd, a couple more (minor) nitpicks: 1) the --image-version option is also not documented in the man page, although it is listed in the usage message from mkinitrd 2) while the man page states the RAID modules will be loaded if the root partition is on raid, it doesn't mention that it will also load the ext3 (and jbd) modules if the root partition is ext3 and that is currently a module. that's a pretty important point to emphasize, i think.
oops, small correction to a previous addition. i repeated myself when i said --image-version is not documented. i meant, in the second case, to say that --nocompress is not documented. mea culpa.
Fixed in mkinitrd-3.3