As I indicated I also used Tomas M initramfs_create function (in separate dependency script) to create the initrd.img I use with KLA.
There was an extra reason/advantage to doing that for Arch Linux case:
A year or two ago upstream Arch Linux moved to using zst compression of its kernel modules, which it turned out broke my earlier WDL_Arch64 new builds. I discovered back then that that was because busybox (still) doesn't support zst compression (and it is a big piece of code to patch into busybox as it happens) so busybox modprobe couldn't load zst compressed modules. Since that time, for WDL_Arch use, I have therefore been making an alternative skeleton initrd that included kmod plus lib dependencies into the original FR initrd I used for booting WDL_Arch64. Problem with that has been that I needed to maintain that special kmod skeleton initrd as well as the one used by KLV-Airedale, and also it is swelled in size because of the kmod stuff..
However... using Tomas M initramfs_create function allowed me to easily first uncompress the Arch zst modules at build time and only include any required ones in the resulting initrd.img. In fact it is advantageous to use uncompressed modules since both the initrd and the main root filesystem get compressed anyway and you end up with better overall compression if you compress the whole set of modules at last step rather than compress already compressed modules, if you see what I mean...
However, Tomas M initramfs_create function as provided at https://github.com/Tomas-M/linux-live/b ... mfs_create only uses xz (per its line 151):
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find . -print | cpio -o -H newc 2>/dev/null | xz -T0 -f --extreme --check=crc32 >$INITRAMFS.img So I change that very slightly to allow for distros that use other module compression types such as gz and zst, via:
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case $2 in #wiak: providing extra compression choices than xz
gz) find . -print | cpio -o -H newc 2>/dev/null | gzip >../$INITRAMFS.img
;;
xz) find . -print | cpio -o -H newc 2>/dev/null | xz -T0 -f --extreme --check=crc32 >../$INITRAMFS.img
;;
zst) find . -print | cpio -o -H newc 2>/dev/null | zstd -6 >../$INITRAMFS.img # wiak - should investigate alternative compression factors
;;
esacwhere script arg $2 is used to pass compression type.
Net result, for example, is that KLA_OT2 is no longer based on alternative kmod-including initrd, but just built directly starting with the same skeleton initrd as KLV uses since the modules added into it via Tomas M function are auto-uncompressed so busybox modprobe has no issue with them. That's a big plus since it was a real pain having to maintain that alternative kmod initrd variant... This will also apply to new version of firstribit (i.e. old weedogit) when it comes to the FR initrd for upstream Arch-based distros. Not sure when I'll get round to that next firstribit though - did make one at one point a couple of months back (a quick hack...), but then worked on something else and forgot about it and can't remember where I left off...
At the moment I'm busy re-installing Zorin for business use, though now that printing is working fine on my KLV install I'm tempted to use that instead actually, but my partner will want to keep with Ubuntu-based distro, for various app-related reasons, so Zorin continues to fit the bill and my keeping familiar with its maintenance is very important so I better stick with that too... As one of many items on my own experiment todo list I'm hoping to have another look at using SG2D; crazy really since I don't really use it, but I want to see if it is still able to boot KL distros and I have a slight boot improvement in mind for the initrd that may or may not be easy to implement. I suppose I should take another quick look at Ventoy again at the same time, but I really didn't like it or understand what info it was expecting); SG2D is easy enough, but Ventoy docs failed to cross my brain barrier - of course my 'not liking it' is more about my not taking time to understand it; I'm pretty sure Ventoy is a great product - I'm just a bit overloaded and more than a bit lazy at reading technical details required sometimes. I am somewhat biased in that I find traditional frugal installs pretty easy to make anyway and without needing some specially installed support system like SG2D or Ventory to use them, and it is easy enough to get grub2 to boot from an iso anyway, which could simply be scripted (well, to some extent I suppose that is what SG2D is, albeit a somewhat complicated under the hood one - you do need a working grub installation either way).
