-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 2014-06-26 04:17, Linda Walsh wrote:
Andrey Borzenkov wrote:
--- Oh -- and you are not at a disadvantage if you don't put the new modules and on a ram disk and regenerate that?
How is that different? Doesn't the normal grub process as suse has it setup require a rebuilt initfs?
Not that I'm aware of. Bootloader setup in openSUSE is done by update-bootloader and I do not see a single mkinitrd call in there.
How do you get modules from a new kernel onto your ramdisk?
If the ram disk is not dependent on kernel modules for specific hardware, then can someone explain why a ramdisk is needed to pre-boot from?
It is a different issue, Linda. You can have a kernel with all the needed modules for booting included in the kernel itself, thus not as modules, thus a big kernel, or you can instead have an auxiliary archive with the needed modules for booting, as modules, available at boot time, before the filesystem is accessible, with a resulting kernel that is smaller (both in memory foot print and as file). With modularity the distribution can distribute the same smallish kernel for everybody, and have instead adjusted the module archive (initrd) per installation, customized on each single machine. But that initrd archive is not created at all by any grub related tool. You can modify the archive, and do not tell grub about the modification. Grub will happily load it for the kernel on boot. Lilo can not do that, you have to recreate the lilo map. The initrd archive is a kernel feature, not a grub feature. Grub simply provides a service that the kernel needs. And this feature allows distributions to provide a method that works for (almost) everybody without tinkering, which is the goal of a distribution, as a distribution. You, as administrator of your machines, can act differently. You could also design a booting procedure with grub and without initrd, if you wished. Don't ask me how, I'm not interested in doing it, though :-) By the way, I just looked up "initrd" in the wikipedia. It says about the same thing I wrote above - and I promise I did not read the article before that, nor did I write anything in the wikipedia. The body of the article mentions neither grub nor lilo - only one item in the "references section" about "dracut", not initrd, has the word "grub" on it. - -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" at Telcontar) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlOr4S0ACgkQtTMYHG2NR9UPxgCfUch1fNRAs5ba40VV+82t29rG 3ecAn3zrQT9smAj0ntHxRlNLLBnMp7OQ =1Mkf -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org