* Tara L Andrews [Tue, 8 May 2001 02:01:45 -0400]:
In my opinion, initrd is a great idea for when you sell a Linux distribution with a precompiled kernel and need to decide at installation time what hardware needs to be supported on boot
That's not the only reason for using an initrd. Another one is, that the kernel created is too large to fit on the installation boot disk. We did have that problem with the 2.4 kernels and so compiled reiserfs as a module which gets loaded via initrd. Another one would be the need to run the isapnp tool to configure ISA PnP cards for a 2.2 kernel. That could be done from an initrd. My experience is, that initrds are rather easy to use and eliminate the need to compile a kernel. Of cause the benefit for a Linux distributor like us is much higher. In the olden days we had to offer 20+ kernels, all compiled with different SCSI drivers. That prohibited offering SMP and Pentium optimized kernels as the number of kernels we would have to provide would have exploded. -- Penguins to save the dinosaurs -- Handelsblatt on Linux for S/390