Including genkernel initramfs in a static kernel

[D-LINC]

Hey guys, I have a somewhat unusual situation: One of my Gentoo systems does not have a boot directory, but instead boots off a kernel on a cdrom. (I won't bore you with the story of why I have to do this.) The kernel is built as a static kernel (no loadable module support) and I include the initramfs directly in the kernel, through the field in menuconfig that allows me to specify the path to the initramfs to include. In the past I have not used genkernel for any of this, but instead I hand crafted my own initramfs, and then used "make menuconfig" and "make isoimage", and this worked well enough.

However, my hand-crafted initramfs has some issues, and I was hoping instead to use a proper initramfs built by some other program. My thought was to use "genkernel initramfs" to produce the initramfs (with LVM, RAID, and other special support that I need) and then just include this in the kernel like I did the handcrafted one. However, the kernel doesn't seem to be work with the initramfs produced by genkernel -- like there is some kind of file formatting issue. When I first tried to build the kernel, the build process immediately croaked and spit out a bunch of mangled error data complaining about not being able to read the initramfs file or something like that. I thought maybe it needed to be gzipped, so I gzipped the initramfs and tried again. This time, the kernel iso image successfully built, but when I tried to boot into the new kernel, it died with a kernel panic, and gave some kind of error about the "initramfs magic".

So, do I need to process the genkernel-produced initramfs first in some special way?
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frigidcode.com

[khayyam]

D-LINC ...

I the option is INITRAMFS_SOURCE and can be a .cpio (uncompressed) or a directory containing the files to be included, I think at some point I too had issues when providing a cpio image, though I can't remember the circumstances exactly.

If your needs are one or more of the following: LVM, dmcrypt/LUKS, software RAID, Tuxonice, swsusp/uswsusp, rescue shell, then you might want to take a look at better-initramfs, the build process is simple, transparent, and configurable. Simply edit bootstrap/bootstrap-all.conf and define the features (above) you require, then run 'bootstrap/bootstrap-all && make prepare', 'sourceroot' would then be the directory to provide to INITRAMFS_SOURCE.

HTH & best ... khay