The author twice mentioned looking for a suitably tiny initrd / initramfs. FYI: You don't need an initrd / initramfs. Just link the drivers required for mounti

The author twice mentioned looking for a suitably tiny initrd / initramfs. FYI: You don't need an initrd / initramfs. Just link the drivers required for mounting the rootfs from IDE statically into the kernel image and you're done. Initrd used to be a kludge to work around bootloaders not supporting multiboot. And then we normalized that deviation in the form of initramfs.