Initial ramdisk
temporary root file system loaded during early boot of Linux operating system
In Linux systems, initrd (initial ramdisk) is a scheme for loading a temporary root file system into memory, to be used as part of the Linux startup process. initrd and initramfs (from initial RAM file system) refer to two different methods of achieving this. Both are commonly used to make preparations before the real root file system can be mounted.
Rationale
Many Linux distributions ship a single, generic Linux kernel image – one which the distribution's developers create specifically to boot on a wide variety of hardware. The device drivers for this generic kernel image are included as loadable kernel modules because statically compiling many drivers into one kernel causes the kernel image to be much larger, perhaps too large to boot on computers with limited memory, or in some cases to cause boot-time crashes or other problems due to probing for nonexistent or conflicting hardware. This static-compiled kernel approach also leaves modules in kernel memory which are no longer used or needed, which in turn raises the problem of detecting and loading the modules necessary to mount the root file system at boot time, or for that matter, deducing where or what the root file system is.
To further complicate matters, the root file system may be on a software RAID volume, LVM, NFS (on diskless workstations), or on an encrypted partition. All of these require special preparations to mount.
Another complication is kernel support for hibernation, which suspends the computer to disk by dumping an image of the entire contents of memory to a swap partition or a regular file, then powering off. On next boot, this image has to be made accessible before it can be loaded back into memory.
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This entry incorporates text from “Initial ramdisk” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.