Sortix
Sortix Download Manual Development Source Code News Blog More
current nightly

Sortix nightly manual

This manual documents Sortix nightly, a development build that has not been officially released. You can instead view this document in the latest official manual.

NAME

update-initrd — generate initialization ramdisk

SYNOPSIS

update-initrd [--sysmerge] [--sysroot=sysroot]

DESCRIPTION

update-initrd generates the /boot/sortix.initrd initrd(7) containing a minimal system that searches for the root filesystem and chain boots it as described in initrd(7) and init(8). It contains an init system, fsck, filesystem drivers and configuration.
The produced minimal system contains copies of fstab(5), extfs(8), fsck.ext2(8), and init(8). If any of those files are updated then the initrd(7) should be regenerated by invoking update-initrd.
update-initrd is written as a script so the initrd of the new system can produced even across incompatible ABI changes.
The options are as follows:
--sysmerge
Generate an initrd(7) for the pending upgrade in /sysmerge inside the sysroot. This must be used in combination with invoking the matching /sysmerge/sbin/update-initrd program directly for forward compatibility.
--sysroot=sysroot
Rather than generating an initrd(7) for the root filesystem, locate files in the sysroot directory instead and store the result as sysroot/boot/sortix.initrd.

FILES

/etc/fstab
/sbin/extfs
/sbin/fsck.ext2
/sbin/init

EXIT STATUS

update-initrd will exit 0 on success and non-zero otherwise.

SEE ALSO

tar(1), fstab(5), initrd(7), disked(8), extfs(8), init(8), sysmerge(8), update-grub(8)
Copyright 2011-2025 Jonas 'Sortie' Termansen and contributors.
Sortix's source code is free software under the ISC license.
#sortix on irc.sortix.org
@sortix_org