Kernel compile problems

Dave Andruczyk djandruczyk at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 11 13:52:57 EDT 2003


--- "Mark T. Valites" <valites at geneseo.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, Robert Dege wrote:
> 
> >
> > Actually, I had some form of an enlightenment... so to speak.  I noticed
> > that mkinitrd was complaining about my scsi controller driver not being a
> > module.  So I disable _ALL_ SCSI in the kernel config.  After running make
> > install, mkinitrd _STILL_ complained about the scsi driver. (Yes I did a
> make
> > distclean prior ro re-compiling ;)
> >
> > This makes me think kudzu or some sort of config file might be forcing
> > mkinitrd to search for the scsi module.
> 
> Is there any particular reason you need an initial ram disk? Why not build
> without it?

initial ramdisks are ONLY needed if you compiled a driver needed for bootup as
a module. (things like a SCSI/IDE controller module, or the module for your
root filesystem)  If you compiled all those things in, you don't need an
initial ramdisk.  The reason initial ramdisks came to be was to allow a lean
kernel to be used for a large numbers of machines with a small ramdisk to load
the necessary modules forthe system to boot. Thus allow one kernel image to be
used for a large installation of machines.   This also aloows a smaller kerne
lto be built as more and more stuff is compiled in the kernel size grows,
potentially leading to size issues. (won't fit on a floppy, etc..)

Some drivers compiled in an significantly increase the kernel size (XFS
filesystem on SMP machines is HUGE, 470K just for the module on an SMP system)
If your root FS was on xfs, and you had an SMP box, there's a good chance the
kernel wouldn't load properly if XFS was compiled in, thus the need for an
initial ramdisk, and to have XFS as a module...



=====
Dave J. Andruczyk

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