As a final step towards laying the foundation for discontinuing the use
of initramfs in the most common boot scenarios, I've been experimenting
with building all PATA/SATA drivers into the kernel. It works on the few
machines that I've tested, so I'm looking for a wider audience for
further testing. I have binary debs at

http://people.ubuntu.com/~rtg/2.6.28-4.6-build-in-ata

In order to boot without initramfs you'll have to edit
/boot/grub/menu.lst to comment out the initrd statement, and also change
the kernel root to reference your root device. For example, my menu.lst
clause looks like this:

title Ubuntu jaunty (development branch), kernel 2.6.28-4-generic
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-4-generic root=/dev/sda1 ro

quiet
#kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-4-generic
root=UUID=86186ea6-6c7f-481a-9d3c-ed8011d58e42 ro
#initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-4-generic

I imagine there is a better way to do this. Passing 'noinitrd' as a boot
parameter didn't appear to work.

If you want to build your own kernel, I have a build-in-ata topic branch
in my Jaunty git repository at kernel.ubuntu.com. For example,

git clone git://kernel.ubuntu.com/rtg/ubuntu-jaunty
git checkout -b build-in-ata origin/build-in-ata

rtg
--
Tim Gardner tim.gardner@canonical.com

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