2009/1/15 Jeff Mahoney <jeffm@suse.de>:
Rob OpenSuSE wrote:
2009/1/15 Matt Sealey <matt@genesi-usa.com>:
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 8:53 AM, Rob OpenSuSE <rob.opensuse.linux@googlemail.com> wrote:
There are end user benefits to mountable initrd's, and would have been a much better workround for one bug, than what I actually had to do.
Actually you would have been just as stuck with squashfs. It's a read-only file system. You can't loopback mount it and change it. In the end, you end up having to do the same thing you'd have to do with cpio - you just replace "zcat initrd | cpio -id" with "mount -o loop".
If it's RO and you can't alter it, then there wouldn't seem to be any end user benefit apart from casual browsing, to overcome the "if it ain't broke don't fix it". Just developer benefit through supporting fewer formats. This is what led me to believe, SquashFS was permitting easier modification, I think I misunderstood that. 2009/1/14 Matt Sealey <matt@genesi-usa.com>:
What advantages do you know of?
Appending files is a breeze compared to a cpio archive. Replacing the same file in a cpio usually means dumping and remaking it. mksquashfs can get rid of the original file and relink the new one at the end.. it would mean you can do clever tricks like building half the initrd or filesystem image, doing something else based on that result, and then appending further processed data.
Though mounting, copying to disk, and then re-building the formatted file, is more like making iso files. "zcat initrd | cpio -id" and then rebuilding, wasn't obvious enough to get suggested when I had an issue with replacing the driver with mkinintrd on a live system. It is still a nice to have, as udev generating it's own module list, to be combined with INITRD_MODULES, doesn't make the change methodology clear to the sysadmin. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+help@opensuse.org