[PATCH] documentation: Documentation/initrd.txt

I spent a long time the other day trying to examine an initrd image on a
fedora core 5 system because the initrd.txt file is apparently obsolete.
Here is a patch which I hope will reduce future confusion for others.

Signed-off-by: Thomas Horsley <tom.horsley@ccur.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

diff --git a/Documentation/initrd.txt b/Documentation/initrd.txt
index b1b6440237a6ef82fa367fdc4560e7b6d3590eb2..15f1b35deb3410932fcf5d9ef7fad28f69080408 100644 (file)
--- a/Documentation/initrd.txt
+++ b/Documentation/initrd.txt
@@ -72,6 +72,22 @@ initrd adds the following new options:
     initrd is mounted as root, and the normal boot procedure is followed,
     with the RAM disk still mounted as root.
 
     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

 
 Installation
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 Installation
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