here's hoping this is on topic. as part of the extra goodies i'm going to give my RHEL/centos basic admin class this week, i'm going to get them to open up the standard initrd.img file and see what's inside. i just did that myself and have a couple simple questions.

first, while the cpio archive physically contains a number of basic /dev special files, the top-level "init" script runs "mknod" to create them all, anyway. not a big deal, but is it fair to say that populating the initrd.img with those initial /dev files is redundant since init creates them all, anyway?

also, i note that that "init" script appears to call a couple scripts/commands that don't exist in the initrd, such as hotplug and mkblkdevs. again, not a big deal but if i show the students what's in that initrd, chances are someone's going to notice the above and ask about it, so i might as well have an answer. thanks.

rday