Greetings a;;But the root should be mounted before firmware, I'm looking at my messages log and everything including swap seems to be there before the firmware loader is called. That's on a 2.6.31 kernel, but still...
2.6.33-rc2 isn't terribly stable here, but the first problem is .6 seconds into the boot, it hangs for 1 minute waiting on the amd cpu firmware, which I don't believe it ever finds, it just times out and goes on. This machine runs fairly well without that even for a cold boot.
I assume this is because the root filesystem with /lib/firmware is not yet available, and that if this file was supplied in the initrd file, this would go away.
I've studied the manpage for mkinitrd, but the precise option to do this preload escapes me.