linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v3 0/3] initrd: remove half of classic initrd support

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Message-ID: <20251022082604.25437-1-safinaskar@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2025 11:26:04 +0300
From: Askar Safin <safinaskar@...il.com>
To: hch@...radead.org
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Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 0/3] initrd: remove half of classic initrd support

Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>:
> On Tue, Oct 21, 2025 at 03:05:35PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> > Without Acks or buy-in from other maintainers this is not a change we
> > can just do given that a few people already piped up and expressed
> > reservations that this would be doable for them.
> > 
> > @Christoph, you marked this as deprecated years ago.
> > What's your take on this?
> 
> I'd love to see it go obviously.  But IIRC we had various users show
> up, which speaks against removing it.  Maybe the first step would be
> a separate config option just for block-based initrd?

So far in recent months 3 people spoke against initrd removal. All they are in Cc. They are:

- Julian Stecklina. He planned to use initrd with erofs, which is currently
not supported anyway. Also, he replied to v1:
"You have all my support for nuking so much legacy code!"
"Acked-by: Julian Stecklina <julian.stecklina@...erus-technology.de>"
( https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1f9aee6090716db537e9911685904786b030111f.camel@cyberus-technology.de/ )

- Gao Xiang, maintainer of erofs. He also planned to use initrd with erofs,
which is currently not supported anyway. Also, he said to me:
> Again, I don't have any strong opinion to kill initrd entirely because
> I think initdax may be more efficient and I don't have any time to work
> on this part -- it's unrelated to my job.
( https://lore.kernel.org/all/79315382-5ba8-42c1-ad03-5cb448b23b72@linux.alibaba.com/ )

- Nicolas Schichan. He has million devices, which use initrd. But they use
root=/dev/ram code path, not linuxrc code path, which I'm removing. He
explained this here:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250918152830.438554-1-nschichan@freebox.fr/

So, this patchset will not impact these people. So, I think it is okay
to remove linuxrc now. We can revert this patchset if needed.

-- 
Askar Safin