[SOLVED] Installer Initrd

bw42 · 06-27-2020, 08:42 AM

I've been reading through various websites on initrd and busybox. Have tried searching through the Slackware wiki. But my searches seem to fall short of what I'm working to do.

Is there somewhere I'm missing with info, or a helpful script, to built the initrd containing the Slackware installer?

I've extracted the setup scripts from the initrd and haven been setting up a busybox configuration.
I was just hoping there would be something that could save me time.

hazel · 06-27-2020, 08:45 AM

Yes, there's a very good shell script in /usr/share/mkinitrd. It will scan your hardware and print out a list of the modules you need to specify for inclusion when running the mkinitrd command.

bw42 · 06-27-2020, 08:55 AM

Thank you Hazel, I am aware of the mkinitrd generator script.
I'm not trying to make an initrd to just boot my system though.
From what I've seen that script works to make one for the already installed system.

I'm trying to make a new initrd environment to run the setup scripts for installing Slackware with.
I have the busybox binary built for PowerPC64le and extracted the setup scripts from the Slackware64 installer.

I'm now working on figuring out how to put it all together into a bootable install environment.

bifferos · 06-27-2020, 10:11 AM

For reverse engineering/rebuild of existing initrd, you can try my Python initrd module. It works on most platforms and you don't need to be root.

python3 -m pip install initrd

See the examples for how to use it:
https://github.com/bifferos/initrd/tree/master/examples

It requires gcc and kernel sources so it can find /usr/src/linux/usr/gen_init_cpio.c for re-assembly.

bw42 · 06-27-2020, 10:44 AM

Thank you Bifferos, that is very interesting. Will play with it.

I realized I somehow missed the installer source when I mirrored the Slackware64 source.
Which has the scripts I was looking for.

Nothing like causing yourself problems.