Linux Solutions

Welcome to the tutorial guide. The guide will provide a user with guidance and instructions on how to to boot without a disk device driver.

Please note that for most systems, the ATA disk device driver must be bound into the base kernel because the root filesystem is on an ATA disk and the kernel cannot mount the root filesystem, much less read any LKMs from it, without the ATA disk driver. If you want the device driver for the root filesystem to be an LKM, then this can be done with Initrd:

Let’s see what is Initrd. Initrd is the name of the initial ramdisk feature of Linux. With this, you have your loader load a filesystem into memory (as a ramdisk) before starting the kernel. When it starts the kernel, it tells it to mount the ramdisk as the root filesystem. A user can put the disk device driver for the real root filesystem and all the software that is required is to load it in that ramdisk filesystem. The startup programs (which live in the ramdisk) eventually mount the real (disk) filesystem as the root filesystem. It is good to know that a ramdisk doesn’t require any device driver.

If you followed advise and guidance as provided in this tutorial guide then you would have learnt about booting without a disk device driver.