C. Linus Hicks wrote:
I think you mis-understand the initrd.img file. From the initrd man page:
BOOT-UP OPERATION When booting up with initrd, the system boots as follows:
1. The boot loader loads the kernel program and /dev/initrd's contents into memory.
2. On kernel startup, the kernel uncompresses and copies the contents of the device /dev/initrd onto device /dev/ram0 and then frees the memory used by /dev/initrd.
It continues from there, but the point is that when you mount a ram disk, it doesn't associate a pre-existing filesystem with it. The mount gives you a brand new empty memory filesystem. The procedure as described above adds the steps of uncompressing the initrd image, then copying it onto the newly created ram disk.
You can verify its contents by doing something similar:
1. Copy your initrd to /tmp. 2. Rename it to include the .gz extension. 3. gunzip it. 4. mount it: mount <unzipped img file> <some mount point> -o loop
I figured out the problem of seeing the contents of the initrd - it seems that mount is quite happy to accept a gzipped ramdisk, it just displays that disk as empty. I had to manually uncompress the disk and mount it a second time before I could see the contents of the disk.
None of this solves my original problem though, which is that netboot doesn't work. I have confirmed that a file called "disklessrc" is present in the root of the initrd, and I have confirmed that the init=disklessrc is apparently being passed to the kernel, but it would seem that the kernel does not agree.
Is there a way to convince the kernel to print out the command line that it has received? I strongly suspect the command line it is supposed to receive, and the command line it is actually seeing are two very different things, thus the problem.
Regards, Graham --
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