Ramfs, Rootfs and Initramfs

kernel.org

9 points·didizaja··3 comments

This is really interesting. I didn't know that the Linux kernel provided documentation like this. I thought my only recourse for learning about the internals of Linux were man pages, 3rd party tutorials, or reading the kernel source.

This sort of documentation, that doesn't assume prior knowledge, while still being technical, is really hard to get right.

I didn't know either, honestly! I only discovered it while trying to learn about what "rootfs" is when I saw that term in the "Getting Started" section of the Firecracker microVM documentation here [0]. That led me to this [1] Debian wiki, which eventually led to me a Debian ramfs wiki here [2]. That wiki contains the link that is attached to this submission.

And I totally agree with you on the difficulty of making documentation like this! I recently had to create documentation for a project at work that also required not assuming prior knowledge, and it took multiple revisions for me to get it into a state I was happy with. Doing it for the Linux kernel is certainly much more difficult, but I think that speaks to the skill and dedication of the maintainers who do it!

[0]: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main...

[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/rootfs

[2]: https://wiki.debian.org/ramfs

The kernel source repository has a directory specifically for it, strangely called "Documentation" [0] :)

There are also comprehensive web pages for both programmers and system administrators published for all versions and 'latest' [1] which is where the article's document is to be found.

[0] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

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