suse-9.3 initrd wonkyness

[Bruce Marshall]

On Friday 10 February 2006 15:45, Net Llama! wrote:
> I've been fighting with this bizarro problem for the past 3 days, and I'm
> about at my wit's end, so hopefully one of you suse experts can help.
>
> I'm trying to create a suse auto-install CD that will use autoyast to
> install the packages from a separate box on the network.  I've got suse
> 9.3-x86, 10.0-x86, and 10.0-x86_64 all working perfectly.
>
> For reasons which remain a mystery, 9.3-x86_64 seems to have this perverse
> requirement that both a 32 & 64bit initrd be included on the CD or I end
> up with a br0k3n installation, or the installer kernel panics cause it
> can't find init.
>
> Now, maybe both initrds aren't a requirement, but everything i'm reading
> seems to suggest that they are.  At this point, i don't even care why it
> needs both, when 10.0 doesn't, i'd just like to understand where they are
> called/named so that I rename them to something other than 'initrd' and
> 'initrd64'.  Anyone know?

A quick check of the install dvd shows that there is an initrd  or 
initrd-xxxxxxx  in every kernel rpm.

When they select a kernel for the system being installed, they would pick the 
right rpm to get that kernel and with it comes the initrd.

For example, in:

kernel-smp-2.6.13-15.i586.rpm   

there are the following:

/boot/initrd
/boot/initrd-2.6.13-15-smp
/boot/initrd.previous

where the first and last above end up being symlinks to the one in the middle.

There is always a symlink to the initrd-xxx being used so it doesn't matter 
what you call them as long as the symlink gets done.

(or at least that's the way I see it)

And I'm sure they probably run a mkinitrd during the install to pick up the 
modules that they *really* need to have in initrd from the list 
in /etc/sysconfig/kernel