Linux rootfs explanation

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I was trying to understand the term of rootfs, excatly what is it, but I am still not sure about it. Many sources are not clear about it. Is the rootfs:

1. a name of a specific type of filesystem?
2. an alias to the real filesystem, like ext3, ext4 etc., which mounting point is a root folder (‘/’)?
3. just a hierarchical structure, based on FHS?

In: 5

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

rootfs is a special instance of a tmpfs, it contains the uncompressed contents of the initramfs. As the name suggests it is mounted at `/` however usually the system will mount another filesystem on top of it after init is started.

[This](https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.html) kernel doc has more specific info.

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