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

Christoph Hellwig [off-list ref]:

On Tue, Oct 21, 2025 at 03:05:35PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:

quoted

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 [off-list ref]"
( https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1f9aee6090716db537e9911685904786b030111f.camel@cyberus-technology.de/ (local) )

- 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/ (local) )

- 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/ (local)

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