Re: What is the /initrd directory?

["Andrew Smith" <rhml k1k2 com>]

> From: <ofeeley yahoo com>
> 
>> On Thu, 10 Jan 2002, Matthias Saou wrote:
>> 
>> > Once upon a time, J. wrote :
>> > 
>> > > > I'd love a real good answer about what it is too, I'm too lazy
>> > > > right now to go hunting through the init scripts ;-)
>> [snip]
>> > Hmmm, no, I know what the initrd is, I was speaking only about the
>> > /initrd directory. It didn't exist prior to Red Hat Linux 7.2 and it
>> > seems that kernels that use an initrd for booting the system fail if
>> > that empty directory is removed. Also, I noticed that is always is
>> > empty on a running system. I suppose it's only used at boot time...
>> 
>> /initrd is used as a way of keeping processes that were started under
>> the  initial root filesystem running even after the normal root
>> filesystem has  mounted and the initial root filesystem has been
>> unmounted.
> 
> Oisin, I note that it is unmounted as one of the very first things done
> in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit. So in theory it SHOULD be empty. I noticed in
> this thread some reports that it is not always empty. This is getting
> fascinating.
> 
> {^_-}

My original posting on Seawolf where Aaron also asked this - sigh:
(My last question probably should have had a ":-)")

> I am sorry if this is partially repetitive relative to a separately
> posted question but it focuses more exactly on the problem we are
> facing. We have machines with this directory and without. Some with
> this directory have the directory empty.
> 
> Can someone clarify its use? Don't bother responding to both postings
> with somewhat  overlapping questions.
> -------------------------------------------
> Aaron Konstam

Aaron,
after my getting ext3 working (with help from you :-) I noticed that
the /initrd directory had appeared.
The RPM that provided this is: filesystem-2.1.0-2.1.noarch.rpm
I would guess that without this package you might have problems?
-- 
-Cheers
-Andrew

MS ... if only he hadn't been hang gliding!