Thanks for the help Frank. My understanding is the first reboot is special because auto-installation finishes things up. I was wondering if the file system in initrd was required or had hooks somehow for this to execute. It sounds like this is not required by auto-install. Susequent reboots then act normally. You are correct that my kernel does work fine without an initrd (isn't that what I said???). I am trying to save some cleanup and an extra reboot when installing a target system (booting without an initrd would be required to verify normal system operation). After installation any initrd hanging around would never be used. This is not critical, but it is good to know how I can customize things so that an initrd is not built unnecessarily. On Wednesday 08 December 2004 11:29 pm, Frank Steiner wrote:
Anas Nashif wrote
Hi, initrd is always needed and without it the system might not boot. If you need things differently, then you have to do alot of customization..
Not really: If Brain is already using a custom kernel, then he just needs to compile all needed modules into the kernel, which will already be used on the first reboot. That's actually what we do. The important thing is just to remove the "INITRD_MODULES" line in /etc/sysconfig/kernel in a post script before AY writes the bootloader config. Because then AY will detect it does not need any initrd modules and not create an initrd. We need a lot of modules during autoinstall and load them through "insmod" lines in the info file (because I wasn't able to get a kernel 2.6 into AY from SuSE 9.0 :-)), but then we install our "all drivers compiled in" kernel 2.6 rpm and remove the INITRD_MODULES line.
Although I wonder why it is so important to get rid of the initrd on the first reboot...
cu, Frank