Arch and mkinitrd

2006-01-06 - Magnus Therning

A few days ago I ran into some problems after updating my kernel. It was almost certainly due to my own ignorance, however I did solve it and everything was good. Or so I thought. Yesterday I started seeing artefacts on my screen that shouldn’t be there. Squares and lines would appear out of nowhere and disappear as soon as I forced redrawing of the area. Having had problems earlier with frame buffers in Linux I listed the loaded modules. Whooaa! I didn’t spend that much money on my system. I had 133 modules loaded, just a few more than exptected. I received some help on the mailing list.

I turned on the autodetection in /etc/mkinitrd.conf and reduced the ramdisk by more than 50%. When using the --show argument for mkinitrd I noticed that a few extra filesystems were included. There’s a comment that AUTODETECT will limit the included filesystems but it didn’t seem to deliver on that promise. Modifying the list of filesystems does impact what’s included. Then I removed the entire CDROM subsystem, I really don’t need it during boot.

These are the modified lines after the changes:

REMOVE_CDROM=1

AUTODETECT=1

FILESYSTEMS=ext3

The Arch Wiki has an excellent page on initrd of course.