On Fri, 31 May 1996, Paul Gortmaker wrote:
>
> noinitrd=
> Werner's new 2 stage boot process for booting minimal kernel,
> adding modules, and then chroot'ing to the real root, etc.
>
This is only half the story:
initrd=<filename>
( commandline param for LOADLIN, lilo.conf param for LILO)
The ramdisk-image <filename> gets loaded by the bootloader
into /dev/initrd. /dev/initrd gets loaded to /dev/ram, then
it gets unloaded. /dev/ram then gets mounted as /.
If there exists a file /linuxrc it gets executed as kernel thread.
See Documentation/initrd.txt for more.
noinitrd
( without the '=' ) used in conjunction with initrd=<filename>
will inhibit copying /dev/initrd to /dev/ram, hence avoid
executing /linuxrc. /dev/initrd then can be read exactly once,
before it destroys (unloads) itself.
For all this you will need the newer type of boot loaders:
LILO-19
LOADLIN-1.6
SYSLINUX-1.3 (not yet available)
etherboot-2.0
The above loaders also are able to load bzImages (big zImages) directly high.
'bzImage+initrd' was a jointly developed by Werner Almesberger (LILO)
and me (LOADLIN) in order to solve booting problems for the next years.
It is very flexible and the number of possible solutions for booting
and installing Linux-Systems seems not to be limited.
Paul, besides Documentation/initrd.txt you should also have a look at
http://elserv.ffm.fgan.de/~lermen/announce.txt
The info in this doc would be valuable for updateing your BootPrompt-HOWTO,
because it explains how booting has changed.
Hans
<lermen@fgan.de>