It's not really initrd though; the kernel uses initramfs, which is more like tmpfs (emulating a filesystem in the VFS cache) than a ramdisk (a preallocated piec

It's not really initrd though; the kernel uses initramfs, which is more like tmpfs (emulating a filesystem in the VFS cache) than a ramdisk (a preallocated piece of memory that emulates a block device). The files are still loaded from a compressed cpio archive though, and because of the initrd legacy that file is still called initrd in most distributions.