[Xen-ia64-devel] RHEL4 without initrd - too hard!

["Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@xxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Tian, Kevin" <kevin.tian@xxxxxxxxx>
> IIRC, RHEL4 should be able to boot 2.6 kernel without initrd requirement.

Up until RHEL4 I had always built kernels with all the drivers
builtin to avoid the need to copy around initrd and module files
(so I could easily build a kernel on one machine, copy it to
another, and boot it there).

With RHEL4 I finally gave in and started using initrd.  The issue
that tipped me over into this was "udev" ... my non-initrd kernel
just complained that it couldn't open an initial console (because
udev hadn't been started, and so /dev was empty ... i.e. no /dev/console).

It might be possible to work around this by using mknod to make
all the nodes that you need in /dev (booting a rescue CD to do this).
But I figured that it was too much effort to continue to swim
against the tide.

So now my build scripts also run "mkinitrd" and then make a tarball
of the kernel, initrd, and all the files I need from lib/modules.
So I can still just copy one file to another machine ... I just need
to unpack it when I get there.

-Tony

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