Re: [gentoo-user] Hanging out with fbsplash

[Richard Fish <bigfish@asmallpond.org>]

Zac Medico wrote:

>That sounds nice.  Do you use busybox for the root-on-loop-AES setup?  What is better about initramfs?  Do you have to compile the cpio archive into the kernel or is it just as good when you load it like an initrd?  I'm looking forward to the howto ;-).
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Well, I don't use busybox.  The main "problem" using an initrd with
loop-AES is that the memory used by the initrd can never be freed (I
think it can be swapped out though), and thus the reason you want to use
something small like busybox/dietlibc/klibc.  In my case, to make my
initrd small, I ended up using /bin and /lib directories on the /boot
partition to contain the majority of the programs needed by the /linuxrc
script.

But with an initramfs, you don't care as much about the memory problem,
because almost every byte of that can be reclaimed simply by rm -rf'ing
all of the files in the initramfs once you have the root filesystem
mounted and you have pivoted to it.

Thus the reason I don't use busybox...having a 10MB uncompressed
initramfs is not a problem.  I can have bash, glibc, and a bunch of
other regular utilities available before the root is mounted, and when I
am done with them, I simply delete the files and "umount -n -l" the
initramfs.

Oh, and it works either way, but I have a slight preference for
compiling the cpio into the kernel.  It keeps the init environment and
the kernel inexorably linked, and also lets me dump all ramdisk support
from my kernel config.

-Richard

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