I spend hours the other day trying to examine a fedora core 5
initrd file in the mistaken belief that the Documentation/initrd.txt
file might contain relevant information :-). It didn't, but
many web searches later I finally discovered the new key
to decrypting initrd files. Would it be possible to add the
attached patch (or a better one if someone can explain things
in more detail) to the initrd.txt file to avoid future
confusion? Thanks.
--- linux-2.6.17.7/Documentation/initrd.txt 2006-07-27 08:49:30.000000000 -0400
+++ linux-2.6.17.7/Documentation/initrd.txt 2006-07-27 09:02:04.000000000 -0400
@@ -73,6 +73,22 @@
initrd is mounted as root, and the normal boot procedure is followed,
with the RAM disk still mounted as root.
+Compressed cpio images
+----------------------
+
+Recent kernels have support for populating a ramdisk from a compressed cpio
+archive, on such systems, the creation of a ramdisk image doesn't need to
+involve special block devices or loopbacks, you merely create a directory on
+disk with the desired initrd content, cd to that directory, and run (as an
+example):
+
+find . | cpio --quiet -c -o | gzip -9 -n > /boot/imagefile.img
+
+Examining the contents of an existing image file is just as simple:
+
+mkdir /tmp/imagefile
+cd /tmp/imagefile
+gzip -cd /boot/imagefile.img | cpio -imd --quiet
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