boot sequence discussion

[David Nicol]

according to the initrd documentation, the purpose of initrd is to
pre-load the correct modules in a more reliable way than modprobe.
Mkinitrd flatly refuses to run against the nonmodular kernel I have built.

I'm also a little bit surprised that things in /sbin aren't all
statically linked
any more; I think that requirement went away some time ago.

There's this "initial ramdisk" thing now that looks really exciting:  apparently
you list files or directories and those things get cpio-ed up and bundled right
with the bzImage, which strikes me as an excellent way to put together a
pocket router or a good rescue disk image:

Never mind a rescue filesystem, just copy this file to your boot partition and
add a rescue option in grub.conf!