Transferring the root filesystem to the target
After having created a skeleton root filesystem in your staging directory, the next task is to transfer it to the target. In the sections that follow, I will describe three possibilities:
- initramfs: Also known as a ramdisk, this is a filesystem image that is loaded into RAM by the bootloader. Ramdisks are easy to create and have no dependencies on mass storage drivers. They can be used in fallback maintenance mode when the main root filesystem needs updating. They can even be used as the main root filesystem in small embedded devices, and they are commonly used as the early user space in mainstream Linux distributions. Remember that the contents of the root filesystem are volatile, and any changes you make in the root filesystem at runtime will be lost when the system next boots. You would need another storage type to store permanent data such as configuration parameters.
- Disk image: This is a copy of the root filesystem formatted...