Re: [BK PATCHES] initramfs merge, part 1 of N

[H. Peter Anvin]

Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> 
>> On Sat, Nov 02, 2002 at 03:13:45AM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>>  
>>
>>> The Future.
>>>
>>> Early userspace is going to be merged in a series of evolutionary 
>>> changes, following what I call "The Al Viro model."  NO KERNEL 
>>> BEHAVIOR SHOULD CHANGE.  [that's for the lkml listeners, not you 
>>> <g>]  "make" will continue to simply Do The Right Thing(tm) on all 
>>> platforms, while the kernel image continues to get progressively 
>>> smaller.
>>>   
>>
>>
>> Won't the initial userspace be linked into the kernel? If so, why will
>> the kernel image get smaller?
>>  
>>
> 
> Yes and no ;-)
> 
> Ignoring for a moment initramfses loaded from your bootloader (a la 
> initrd)...   The amount of code that runs in kernel space shrinks, which 
> is the main point of early userspace.  If you are talking in terms of 
> overall kernel image size, yes, but the initramfs cpio archive is 
> ditching along with the rest of __init code, so you're really only 
> talking about wasting a couple of additional pages in vmlinux -- a 
> slight increase in disk space usage, and that's it.
> 
> So runtime memory usage certainly does not increase...
> 

By the way, the final initramfs should typically be a union of whatever 
sources there are; with the ones linked into the kernel image unpacked 
first (so they can be overwritten if so specified to the bootloader.)

	-hpa