“The process of booting a Linux system consists of a number of stages. But whether you’re booting a standard x86 desktop or a deeply embedded PowerPC target, much of the flow is surprisingly similar. This article explores the Linux boot process from the initial bootstrap to the start of the first user-space application. Along the way, you’ll learn about various other boot-related topics such as the boot loaders, kernel decompression, the initial RAM disk, and other elements of Linux boot.”
IBM has many documents like this, some that even get pretty in-depth and technical, plus many that are suitable for first-timers to Linux. This particular one was more basic than I thought it was going to be, but that is good, as I am a fairly non-technical Linux user.
Kudos to them for taking the time for the (mostly) thankless task of writing up documentation.
I fully agree. DeveloperWorks is the most useful of IBM’s contributions to the open source community, in my opinion.
-IBMer
Since it mentions initial ram disk rather than the initial ram filesystem I would not bother to read it and seek a much fresher resource instead.