F3 initrd strangeness

[Orion Poplawski]

T. Horsnell (tsh) wrote:
> I'm having problems building a diskless net-bootable FC3 kernel,
> and decided to take a look inside the vanilla initrd file
> initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img. However, if I gunzip this and try
> to mount it, the mount fails:
> Can anyone else successfully mount their FC3 initrd?
> Any ideas what may be stopping me?
> 
> Cheers,
> Terry.
> 

With FC3 (actually, with some version of mkinitrd) the initrd is an 
"initramfs" image:

# gunzip -c initrd-2.6.9-1.681_FC3.img > initrd-2.6.9-1.681_FC3.raw
# file initrd-2.6.9-1.681_FC3.raw
initrd-2.6.9-1.681_FC3.raw: ASCII cpio archive (SVR4 with no CRC)

So, it's a cpio archive now.

Note that the kernel can still handle the old initrd images as well.