Re: Initrd unzipped ?

[Thierry Laronde]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2001 at 03:16:47PM -0700, address@hidden wrote:
> 
> OKUJI Yoshinori <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > > It seems that when one uses an initrd with Linux, the initrd is unzipped.
> > > If I'm right, since Linux is able to unzip the initrd too, and since it
> > > first moves the initrd to a ramdisk, this is not practical (one waste
> > > memory).
> > 
> > I'm not sure. The code is derived from Erich's version of GRUB "as
> > is", so there might be a reason for that (e.g. ancient Linux didn't
> > support gzip-loading? Erich?)
> > 
> > Anyway, at least 2.0.38 supports gzip-loading, so I think it would be
> > better to disable the automatic decompression behavior in GRUB. If
> > nobody objects to that, I'll do that.
> 
> Hmm...  I never really looked to closely at the fact that it would
> tend to decompress your initrd image automatically.  It always seemed
> to just work.  Clearly I didn't inspect how it was working too closely.
> 
> BTW, does this cause a problem of some kind?  Or is this just a case
> of violation of expectations?

Yes, at least for memory usage on small memory machines : the compress image
takes less room, since the Linux kernel will move the image to one of it ram
disk, the place occupied by the decompress image is, during boot time, lost.

Regards,
-- 
Thierry LARONDE, Centre de Ressources Informatiques, Archamps - France
http://www.cri74.org/