D T's Public Library

Manually building a custom initial RAM disk

Because there is no hard drive in many embedded systems based on Linux, the
initrd also serves as the permanent root file system. Listing 4 shows how to create
an initrd image. I'm using a standard Linux desktop so you can follow along
without an embedded target. Other than cross-compilation, the concepts (as they apply to initrd
construction) are the same for an embedded target.

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It is possible to have multiple thinstation.conf.<something> - 'conf' files are looked for in this order:




• thinstation.conf.buildtime (puts config directives in the boot image)
  
• thinstation.conf.network (default config, pulled from tftp server)
  
• thinstation.hosts (contains host, MAC, and group mappings)
  



If thinstation.hosts exists, the following file(s) are looked for (careful! Note where to use "." and where to use "-"):