Timeline for When installing linux, why do we need to mount our "root partition" to "/", and what does it do?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Dec 28, 2023 at 12:49 | comment | added | user10489 | @stevea : Correct, I agree with all that, but I think it might support a squashfs too. All the pieces for it are certainly in place, it just needs to check the format, and if I recall correctly, it wasn't always a gzip'ed cpio. | |
| Dec 28, 2023 at 11:22 | comment | added | stevea | NO. initramfs is a gzip'ed cpio archive which is expanded (decompressed and de-archived) into a ramfs (specifically 'rootfs') filesystem. This is described in the kernel docs. The ungzip and cpio-i features are built into the kernel and not external programs. | |
| Dec 21, 2023 at 5:48 | comment | added | user10489 | Technically I think the initramfs could be a squashfs that doesn't need to be uncompressed to be mounted instead of a compressed cpio archive, but I'm not aware of any distro that does that, but they should. | |
| Dec 21, 2023 at 1:30 | comment | added | stevea | Agree. In more detail, an intramfs file is loaded into memory, and part of that file is a compressed filesystem which becomes the initial root '/'. After some system initialization, the fstab in the initramfs (usually a copy of the actual fstab) is consulted, the "real" of final roofs (perhaps /dev/sdb2) is mounted, and then a very clever switch from the initramfs-root to the 'real' root is executed, and the memory for initramfs is deallocated. | |
| Dec 20, 2023 at 23:33 | history | answered | user10489 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |