Linux Kernel Boot – Booting Without Initrd

Simple answer: No. If you want LVM you need an initrd.

But as others have said before: LVMs don't slow your system down or do anything bad in another way, they just allow you to create an environment that allows your kernel to load and do its job.

The initrd allows your kernel to be loaded: If your kernel is on an LVM drive the whole LVM environment has to be established before the binary that contains the kernel can be loaded.

Check out the Wikipedia Entry on initrd which explains what the initrd does and why you need it.

Another note: I see your point in wanting to do things yourself but you can get your hands dirty even with genkernel. Use genkernel --menuconfig all and you can basically set everything as if you would build your kernel completely without tool support, genkernel just adds the make bzImage, make modules and make modules_install lines for you and does that nasty initrd stuff.

You can obviously build the initrd yourself as it is outlined here for initramfs or here for initrd.

You have a /lib/sata_vio.ko in your initrd? Is (or was) one of your file systems (e.g. / = "root") on a SATA drive that would need that driver? Does an entry for it appear in /etc/modules or /etc/mkinitrd/modules?

On my Ubuntu system, the module is in the same location inside the initrd image, e.g. <extracted initrd>/lib/modules/<uname -r>/drivers/ata/sata_vio.ko.

What does file say? What does strings | grep '\<ver' say? Maybe it's from a different driver or a different kernel version?

Obviously you could use ls -l or du to get an idea if /lib/sata_vio.ko is larger, and run nm -D against both files to see if there is any difference in symbols (e.g. using diff).

The whole process should be documented in man mkinitrd, in particular, it should say what scripts your system runs, perhaps something in /usr/share/initrd-tools/scripts or /etc/mkinitrd/scripts?