Thursday, January 24, 2008

What's that line in /proc/mounts?

When I view the /proc/mounts file, the first line looks like: rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0 I found myself wondering what this line was. Today I figured it out. My first thought was that this is my mounted / directory, however, this is not the case. My mounted / directory appears in /proc/mounts as: /dev/root / ext3 rw,data=ordered 0 0 The first line is actually the initial ram disk (initrd). When the system boots up, this initial ram disk is mounted as the root filesystem. Many Linux systems then just mount the actual root filesystem over top of that. I found this page, http://lwn.net/Articles/156098/, to be very helpful in explaining this.

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