[D-I] Switching initrd filesystem (was: mass kernel udeb update and preparations for RC1)

On Friday 22 September 2006 16:39, Grant Grundler wrote:
> I didn't see anything for parisc (HPPA).
> I don't know of any problems with initramfs on parisc.
> but I don't expect any surprises from the kernel on that.

Maybe I was not clear enough on this. The original text was:
* type of initrd used
  Some arches have already switched to using initramfs for d-i initrds,
  other arches are still using cramfs or ext2. Please check if a change
  could/should be made for your architecture.

The default is:
config/common:59:INITRD_FS = ext2

$ wcgrep INITRD_FS config/hppa
<nothing>

This means that all hppa d-i initrds currently use the default ext2 
filesystem. The question was: should hppa be switched to using initramfs 
instead of ext2 for Debian Installer images?

Whether this is possible depends amongst others on what the bootloaders 
used for different installation methods support.

Note that using intramfs has some advantages as can be seen from these 
changelog entries from Joey for i386/amd64:
* Remove root=/dev/ram from syslinux configs, turns out not to be needed
  for the kernel to find initramfs.
* Remove ramdisk_size= and "rw" settings, also not needed.

The same goes for other architectures:
alpha: uses default ext2
arm/armeb: most subarches use cramfs
ia64: uses cramfs
m68k: uses default ext2
mips: uses cramfs
mipsel: uses cramfs (except bcm947xx/netboot/firmware.cfg: jffs2)
sparc: uses default ext2

i386, amd64, powerpc and s/390 already use initramfs as default.

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