KernelTrap: Yaird, Rewriting mkinitrd

“Erik van Konijnenburg announced Yaird, ‘Yet Another mkInitRD.’
Implemented in Perl, he describes the work in progress and proof of
concept as ‘a rewrite of mkinitrd based on hotplug algorithms.’
Erik explains that he reviewed the existing versions of the
mkinitrd shell script and concluded, ‘they capture a lot of
knowledge about the boot process, but don’t always understand when
a new kernel uses a different module name than the old kernel, may
rely on modules compiled into the kernel, and don’t always catch
errors at the earliest opportunity.’ Instead, yaird utilizes the
sysfs virtual filesystem and existing hotplug algorithms to
determine what drivers are needed to support the current hardware,
thereby minimizing the number of special cases and general
information about modules that the application itself must know
about…”

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