From: Rob Landley Subject: [PATCH 0/5] initmpfs: use tmpfs instead of ramfs for rootfs To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Cc: Alexander Viro Cc: Al Viro Cc: Andrew Morton Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman Cc: Hugh Dickins Cc: Jeff Layton Cc: Jens Axboe Cc: Jim Cromie Cc: linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org Cc: Rusty Russell Cc: Sam Ravnborg Cc: Stephen Warren Use tmpfs for rootfs when CONFIG_TMPFS=y and there's no root=. Specify rootfstype=ramfs to get the old initramfs behavior. The previous initramfs code provided a fairly crappy root filesystem: didn't let you --bind mount directories out of it, reported zero size/usage so it didn't show up in "df" and couldn't run things like rpm that query available space before proceeding, would fill up all available memory and panic the system if you wrote too much to it... Using tmpfs instead provides a much better root filesystem.