- Introduction
This set of utilities is designed for booting the new age of initramfs enabled 2.6 kernel distributions... mouth full!
- What is this initramfs all about?
initramfs is a gzipped cpio archive which is extracted into a dynamically allocated ramdisk apon bootup. This archive contains programs and utilities to bring up raid, evms, lvm ..etc devices, to find your root device, mount it and startup your operating system.
2. Why the hell do I care?
You would care if you are a individual wanting to add encrypted root support.
You would care if you're a distribution maintainer responsible for the boot procedure of your particular distribution.
If you still don't know what is going on, you don't need these utilities.
3. What about run-init or even Redhat's nash?
run-init lacks various features, most notably pre-programed possibilities for what init program to run ... and a number of other things.
nash seems to lack the ability to boot anything other than ext2 and xfs root devices.
4. So what is soo great about these utilities?
Wide range of filesystem support, realistic distribution idependant approach, ease of use.