I am making my own initramfs following the Gentoo wiki. Instead of the familiar tar and gzip, the page is telling me to use cpio and gzip. Wikipedia says that cpio is used by the 2.6 kernel's initramfs, but does not explain why.Is this just a convention or is cpio better for initramfs? Can I still use tar and gzip?
Why use cpio for initramfs?
compression;cpio;initramfs
I'm not 100% sure, but as the initial ramdisk needs to be unpacked by the kernel during boot, cpio is used because it is already implemented in kernel code.