[ARMedslack] Missing files in "uinitrd-kirkwood" to support root file-system on SDHC card

Stuart Winter m-lists at biscuit.org.uk
Thu Feb 18 11:27:33 UTC 2010


> - the busybox (1.12.1) insmod doesn't support compressed modules
>   gunzip works, so this fixes it when the initrd bails:
>     find . -name ".ko.gz" -exec gunzip {} \;
>   (AFAICT .ko.gz support was added in busybox 1.13.4)

The current initrd's use busybox 1.15.3 (which is what's in
Slackware-current at the moment).  I don't see anything in the menuconfig
that indicates that it now includes gzip decompression support.

I've added an option to mkinitrd to use the system versions from
module-init-tools; which works in the installer and I've also had it
confirmed that doing this makes it work in the initrd.
So I'll go with this option for the time being.

> - for a sheevaplug I suspect udev in initrd isoverkill, you only need a
>   handful of  modules and devices to make USB, network and
>   SD/MMC available

udev takes care of populating /dev with the required entries.
Since it doesn't add a great deal of weight to the initrd, I'm happy to
leave it in.
I'm not overly keen on maintaining a manual list of what's required to
boot the device in order to provide generic initrd's, but I don't see any
other way at the moment.  Fortunately the devices are limited by what
hardware is available on them, so it's reasonably straight forward at the
*moment* to maintain the list of kernel modules in kernel.SlackBuild.

> modules myself, I'll probably just stick to uncompressed modules,
> since it's no hit for a compressed initrd image.

You should find that with the next round of updates, all of this is fixed.
I'll send a message when these updates are available.

> I hope I've explained everything clearly.

Yes thanks for that.

I'm very keen to have everything working out of the box.  It's also
worth,however, if you're using -current, to update the system since many
of the problems are already fixed in newer packages.  If I've added a
kernel module that's of particular use, or made a change that's outside of
a Slackware x86 update, I tend to mention it in the changelog; so it's
worth looking out for those.

-- 
Stuart Winter
Slackware ARM: www.armedslack.org


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