On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 03:39:20PM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
Hi all,
I was playing around with the kernel cpio image creation, and was wanting to add an already-built cpio image to an already-built kernel image.
Instead of writing yet-another-script to do this type of thing, I noticed that mkinitcpio's documentation said that it supported this:
Support for the inclusion of the initial ramdisk image in a kernel, thus making a self-contained kernel image possible.
But, I couldn't find this option anywhere in the tool.
Am I missing something here?
This feature doesn't exist anymore. Rewind about 2 years, we used to use the gen_init_cpio program from the usr/ dir of the kernel tree. I suppose, based on Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.txt, that the input list for gen_init_cpio can be used during the kernel build to incorporate the initramfs into the image. mkinitcpio's -s option would stop the initramfs build prior to image creation, leaving behind this input list. Sorry, it seems the wiki page was simply never updated to reflect this. We (ok, I did it) switched to using bsdcpio because it proved to be significantly more efficient and accurate. I'm curious about your idea to write a script which would incorporate the built initramfs into the bzImage -- I didn't realize such a thing was possible. If it's feasible to incorporate into mkinitcpio, I'd accept such a patch (or feature request with documentation on how to do this). Cheers, Dave