slackware-current/README.initrd
Patrick J Volkerding 05ec45c9c9 Thu Oct 26 19:55:16 UTC 2023
a/kernel-firmware-20231024_4ee0175-noarch-1.txz:  Upgraded.
a/kernel-generic-6.1.60-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
a/kernel-huge-6.1.60-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
a/kernel-modules-6.1.60-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
a/shadow-4.14.1-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
d/kernel-headers-6.1.60-x86-1.txz:  Upgraded.
k/kernel-source-6.1.60-noarch-1.txz:  Upgraded.
  Hey folks, if you've been following LQ you know I've talked before about
  dropping the huge kernel and moving the distribution to use only the generic
  kernel plus an initrd. After mulling this over for a few months, I think I
  was looking at the problem in the wrong way. First of all, it's clear that
  some Slackware users have been using the huge kernel all along, without an
  initrd, and are (to say the least) unhappy about the prospect of a new
  requirement to start using one. I've been recommending the generic kernel for
  some time, and a major reason is that we've been using the same set of kernel
  modules with two slightly different kernels. Because of this, there have
  always been a few (generally seldom used) kernel modules that won't load into
  the huge kernel. These are things that aren't built into the huge kernel, but
  because of a difference in some kernel module dependency, they won't load.
  The conclusion that I've come to here is that rather than drop the huge
  kernel, or slap a LOCALVERSION on it and provide a whole duplicate tree of
  kernel modules especially for the huge kernel, it would be better to make the
  generic kernel more huge, and minimize the differences between the two kernel
  configs.
  That's what I've done here.
  Shown below are the differences between the previous generic kernel config
  and the one shipping in this update. You'll notice that most of the popular
  filesystems are built in. At this point the main difference it that the huge
  kernel has a couple of dozen SCSI drivers built into it. The modules for those
  drivers won't load into the huge kernel, but they're fully built in so that
  doesn't matter. If you find any other modules that will not load into the huge
  kernel, please make a note about it on LQ and I'll see what can be done.
  So, tl;dr - what does this change mean?
  Unless your root device is on SCSI, if you were able to use the huge kernel
  without an initrd previously, you should now be able to use the generic
  kernel without an initrd. The kernel is a bit bigger, but we probably have
  enough RAM these days that it won't make a difference.
  Enjoy! :-)
  -CIFS_SMB_DIRECT n
   9P_FS m -> y
   9P_FSCACHE n -> y
   BTRFS_FS m -> y
   CIFS m -> y
   CRYPTO_CMAC m -> y
   CRYPTO_CRC32 m -> y
   CRYPTO_XXHASH m -> y
   CRYPTO_ZSTD m -> y
   EFIVAR_FS m -> y
   EXFAT_FS m -> y
   EXT2_FS m -> y
   EXT3_FS m -> y
   EXT4_FS m -> y
   F2FS_FS m -> y
   FAILOVER m -> y
   FAT_FS m -> y
   FSCACHE m -> y
   FS_ENCRYPTION_ALGS m -> y
   FS_MBCACHE m -> y
   HW_RANDOM_VIRTIO m -> y
   ISO9660_FS m -> y
   JBD2 m -> y
   JFS_FS m -> y
   LZ4HC_COMPRESS m -> y
   LZ4_COMPRESS m -> y
   MSDOS_FS m -> y
   NETFS_SUPPORT m -> y
   NET_9P m -> y
   NET_9P_FD m -> y
   NET_9P_VIRTIO m -> y
   NET_FAILOVER m -> y
   NFSD m -> y
   NLS_CODEPAGE_437 m -> y
   NTFS3_FS m -> y
   NTFS_FS m -> y
   PSTORE_LZ4_COMPRESS n -> m
   PSTORE_LZO_COMPRESS n -> m
   PSTORE_ZSTD_COMPRESS n -> y
   QFMT_V2 m -> y
   QUOTA_TREE m -> y
   REISERFS_FS m -> y
   RPCSEC_GSS_KRB5 m -> y
   SMBFS m -> y
   SQUASHFS m -> y
   UDF_FS m -> y
   VFAT_FS m -> y
   VIRTIO_BALLOON m -> y
   VIRTIO_BLK m -> y
   VIRTIO_CONSOLE m -> y
   VIRTIO_INPUT m -> y
   VIRTIO_MMIO m -> y
   VIRTIO_NET m -> y
   VIRTIO_PCI m -> y
   VIRTIO_PCI_LIB m -> y
   VIRTIO_PCI_LIB_LEGACY m -> y
   VIRTIO_PMEM m -> y
   XFS_FS m -> y
   ZONEFS_FS n -> m
   ZSTD_COMPRESS m -> y
  +NFS_FSCACHE y
  +PSTORE_LZ4_COMPRESS_DEFAULT n
  +PSTORE_LZO_COMPRESS_DEFAULT n
  +PSTORE_ZSTD_COMPRESS_DEFAULT n
kde/plasma-workspace-5.27.9.1-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
l/glib2-2.78.1-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
l/netpbm-11.04.03-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
l/newt-0.52.24-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
n/gpgme-1.23.0-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
n/p11-kit-0.25.1-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
n/php-8.2.12-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
  This is a bugfix release.
  For more information, see:
    https://www.php.net/ChangeLog-8.php#8.2.12
x/xorg-server-21.1.9-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
  This update fixes security issues:
  OOB write in XIChangeDeviceProperty/RRChangeOutputProperty.
  Use-after-free bug in DestroyWindow.
  For more information, see:
    https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2023-October/003430.html
    https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-5367
    https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-5380
  (* Security fix *)
x/xorg-server-xephyr-21.1.9-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
x/xorg-server-xnest-21.1.9-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
x/xorg-server-xvfb-21.1.9-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
x/xorg-server-xwayland-23.2.2-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
  This update fixes a security issue:
  OOB write in XIChangeDeviceProperty/RRChangeOutputProperty.
  For more information, see:
    https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2023-October/003430.html
    https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-5367
  (* Security fix *)
xap/mozilla-thunderbird-115.4.1-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
  This release contains security fixes and improvements.
  For more information, see:
    https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/115.4.1/releasenotes/
    https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2023-47/
    https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-5721
    https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-5732
    https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-5724
    https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-5725
    https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-5726
    https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-5727
    https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-5728
    https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-5730
  (* Security fix *)
xfce/thunar-4.18.8-x86_64-1.txz:  Upgraded.
isolinux/initrd.img:  Rebuilt.
kernels/*:  Upgraded.
usb-and-pxe-installers/usbboot.img:  Rebuilt.
2023-10-26 23:09:17 +02:00

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Text

Slackware initrd mini HOWTO
by Patrick Volkerding, volkerdi@slackware.com
Thu Oct 26 19:07:45 UTC 2023
This document describes how to create and install an initrd, which may be
required to use the 4.x kernel. Also see "man mkinitrd".
1. What is an initrd?
2. Why to I need an initrd?
3. How do I build the initrd?
4. Now that I've built an initrd, how do I use it?
1. What is an initrd?
Initrd stands for "initial ramdisk". An initial ramdisk is a very small
Linux filesystem that is loaded into RAM and mounted as the kernel boots,
and before the main root filesystem is mounted.
2. Why do I need an initrd?
The usual reason to use an initrd is because you need to load kernel
modules before mounting the root partition. Usually these modules are
required to support the filesystem used by the root partition (ext3, ext4,
btrfs, xfs), or perhaps the controller that the hard drive is attached
to (SCSI, RAID, etc). Essentially, there are so many different options
available in modern Linux kernels that it isn't practical to try to ship
many different kernels to try to cover everyone's needs. It's a lot more
flexible to ship a generic kernel and a set of kernel modules for it.
3. How do I build the initrd?
The easiest way to make the initrd is to use the mkinitrd script included
in Slackware's mkinitrd package. We'll walk through the process of
upgrading to the generic 6.1.60 Linux kernel using the packages
found in Slackware's slackware/a/ directory.
First, make sure the kernel, kernel modules, and mkinitrd package are
installed (the current version numbers might be a little different, so
this is just an example):
installpkg kernel-generic-6.1.60-x86_64-1.txz
installpkg kernel-modules-6.1.60-x86_64-1.txz
installpkg mkinitrd-1.4.11-x86_64-33.txz
Change into the /boot directory:
cd /boot
Now you'll want to run "mkinitrd". I'm using ext4 for my root filesystem,
and since the disk controller requires no special support the ext4 module
will be the only one I need to load:
mkinitrd -c -k 6.1.60 -m ext4
This should do two things. First, it will create a directory
/boot/initrd-tree containing the initrd's filesystem. Then it will
create an initrd (/boot/initrd.gz) from this tree. If you wanted to,
you could make some additional changes in /boot/initrd-tree/ and
then run mkinitrd again without options to rebuild the image. That's
optional, though, and only advanced users will need to think about that.
Here's another example: Build an initrd image using Linux 6.1.60
kernel modules for a system with an ext4 root partition on /dev/sdb3:
mkinitrd -c -k 6.1.60 -m ext4 -f ext4 -r /dev/sdb3
4. Now that I've built an initrd, how do I use it?
Now that you've got an initrd (/boot/initrd.gz), you'll want to load
it along with the kernel at boot time. If you use LILO for your boot
loader you'll need to edit /etc/lilo.conf and add a line to load the
initrd. Here's an example section of lilo.conf showing how this is
done:
# Linux bootable partition config begins
image = /boot/vmlinuz-generic
initrd = /boot/initrd.gz
root = /dev/sda6
label = Slackware
read-only
# Linux bootable partition config ends
The initrd is loaded by the "initrd = /boot/initrd.gz" line.
Just add the line right below the line for the kernel image you use.
Save the file, and then run LILO again ('lilo' at the command line).
You'll need to run lilo every time you edit lilo.conf or rebuild the
initrd.
Other bootloaders such as syslinux also support the use of an initrd.
See the documentation for those programs for details on using an
initrd with them.
---------
Have fun!