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[PATCH] update to the initramfs docs

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Based on questions people have asked me.  Repeatedly.

Signed-off-by: Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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Rob Landley 2006-01-08 01:03:43 -08:00 committed by Linus Torvalds
parent d84f520348
commit 99aef427e2
1 changed files with 71 additions and 1 deletions
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72
Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.txt
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@ -143,12 +143,26 @@ as the following example:
dir /mnt 755 0 0
file /init initramfs/init.sh 755 0 0
Run "usr/gen_init_cpio" (after the kernel build) to get a usage message
documenting the above file format.
One advantage of the text file is that root access is not required to
set permissions or create device nodes in the new archive. (Note that those
two example "file" entries expect to find files named "init.sh" and "busybox" in
a directory called "initramfs", under the linux-2.6.* directory. See
Documentation/early-userspace/README for more details.)
The kernel does not depend on external cpio tools, gen_init_cpio is created
from usr/gen_init_cpio.c which is entirely self-contained, and the kernel's
boot-time extractor is also (obviously) self-contained. However, if you _do_
happen to have cpio installed, the following command line can extract the
generated cpio image back into its component files:
cpio -i -d -H newc -F initramfs_data.cpio --no-absolute-filenames
Contents of initramfs:
----------------------
If you don't already understand what shared libraries, devices, and paths
you need to get a minimal root filesystem up and running, here are some
references:
@ -161,13 +175,69 @@ designed to be a tiny C library to statically link early userspace
code against, along with some related utilities. It is BSD licensed.
I use uClibc (http://www.uclibc.org) and busybox (http://www.busybox.net)
myself. These are LGPL and GPL, respectively.
myself. These are LGPL and GPL, respectively. (A self-contained initramfs
package is planned for the busybox 1.2 release.)
In theory you could use glibc, but that's not well suited for small embedded
uses like this. (A "hello world" program statically linked against glibc is
over 400k. With uClibc it's 7k. Also note that glibc dlopens libnss to do
name lookups, even when otherwise statically linked.)
Why cpio rather than tar?
-------------------------
This decision was made back in December, 2001. The discussion started here:
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0112.2/1538.html
And spawned a second thread (specifically on tar vs cpio), starting here:
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0112.2/1587.html
The quick and dirty summary version (which is no substitute for reading
the above threads) is:
1) cpio is a standard. It's decades old (from the AT&T days), and already
widely used on Linux (inside RPM, Red Hat's device driver disks). Here's
a Linux Journal article about it from 1996:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/1213
It's not as popular as tar because the traditional cpio command line tools
require _truly_hideous_ command line arguments. But that says nothing
either way about the archive format, and there are alternative tools,
such as:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/afio/
2) The cpio archive format chosen by the kernel is simpler and cleaner (and
thus easier to create and parse) than any of the (literally dozens of)
various tar archive formats. The complete initramfs archive format is
explained in buffer-format.txt, created in usr/gen_init_cpio.c, and
extracted in init/initramfs.c. All three together come to less than 26k
total of human-readable text.
3) The GNU project standardizing on tar is approximately as relevant as
Windows standardizing on zip. Linux is not part of either, and is free
to make its own technical decisions.
4) Since this is a kernel internal format, it could easily have been
something brand new. The kernel provides its own tools to create and
extract this format anyway. Using an existing standard was preferable,
but not essential.
5) Al Viro made the decision (quote: "tar is ugly as hell and not going to be
supported on the kernel side"):
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0112.2/1540.html
explained his reasoning:
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0112.2/1550.html
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0112.2/1638.html
and, most importantly, designed and implemented the initramfs code.
Future directions:
------------------