SUSE vs. Debian (lindows)

[Brett I. Holcomb]

My understanding is that initrd is used when you don't have the drivers, 
etc. needed to boot in the kernel but they are modules.  This can happen 
for several reasons.  One reason is when you really aren't sure what 
hardware is on the system so you can make things as modules and whatever 
is needed gets loaded.  I'd guess that's why most distros use initrd - 
they can build a bunch of stuff as modules and not have a huge kernel. 
Another reason is that if you build a kernel and need to put it on a 
floppy you have to cut it's size down which means not much goes in the 
kernel.  If you have to cut out, say your SCSI driver, and that's what 
your boot drive is then you make the SCSI stuff a modules and use initrd.

I generally compile everything in the kernel (SCSI for example).  It 
used to be that we needed to keep the kernel small to make boot floppies 
  but today we have Knoppix, Gentoo has it's LiveCD, and others so we 
can boot from a CD and do what we need.


Ken Moffat wrote:
> Joel Hammer wrote:
> 
>> the SUSE mkinitrd script adds reiserfs
>> to the initrd.  Why would it do this if grub natively
>> supports reiserfs? So, there is a lot going on that is
>> not well explained.
>>
>>  
>>
>>
> 
> from the man page:
> 
> USAGE
>       The main motivation for implementing initrd was to allow for 
> modular kernel configuration at system installation.
> 
> hmmm....  maybe that explains something?
>