Re: What is the /initrd directory?

[Aaron Konstam <akonstam trinity edu>]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 02:05:57PM -0800, ofeeley yahoo com wrote:
> 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

iSo why was it never needed before in RH <= 7.1.
-- 
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Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
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