The terminilogy of initramfs/initrd is used pretty lossely, even by
kernel devs.  My understanding is that typically 'initrd' is refering to
an actual filesystem image (created on a loopback) and get's mounted a a
ramdisk and used at the root filesystem.  Where as an initramfs image is
just a CPIO archive that gets unpacked into a tmpfs filesystem that is
then mounted as root.  initramfs images can be either built into the
kernel image or loaded from an external file.  Byeond the format there's
not much difference bewteen them.  In theory an initramfs iamge could be a
bit smaller as it doesn't have to drag around the filesystem metadata
with it.  Also, as it's just a CPIO archive a driver for the
filesystem type need not be built into the kernel.

Wikipedia considers initramfs & initrd to refer to the same thing:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initrd

Cheers,

-J

--
On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 09:38:17PM -0700, Wil Reichert wrote:
> On 5/29/07, Joshua Hoblitt <jhoblitt@ifa.hawaii.edu> wrote:
> >On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 02:33:18AM +0200, Florian D. wrote:
> >> FYI, genkernel is creating an initrd, not an initramfs, which is the
> >preferred way nowadays.
> >> Information on how to setup an initramfs can be found at:
> >> http://lldn.timesys.com/docs/initramfs
> >
> >Umm, I think you need to check your facts.  genkernel creates a gzip'd
> >CPIO archive named "initramfs-genkernel-arch-versionstring"...
> 
> So the command 'genkernel initrd' creates a file called
> 'initramfs-...'  which contains files called etc/initrd.defaults and
> etc/initrd.scripts.  Poor naming conventions but it looks like an
> initrd to me.
> 
> Wil
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