That’s right, we have yet another automated method of breaking Android on your WinMo phones! In the same spirit as the rootfs build service, we’ve got the nice, new initramfs build service. See the original post about why we needed the rootfs build service for the exact same reasons behind this build service.
Now for some technical information. The initramfs is an essential part of booting Android on our phones. There is a lot of bring-up involved every time the system is booted: the kernel must have device nodes available and locate and mount filesystems. This is all handled by the initramfs, up until the root filesystem (which the other build service provides) is live. It will then immediately switch to using the root filesystem for all tasks, continuing execution with the init script in the live root.
The initramfs is pretty well-developed already, so we probably won’t need to make as many changes to it as we do for rootfs. Additionally, the initramfs is meant to be kept as small as possible and perform as little as possible before handing off to the live rootfs. For this reason, the images from the build host will be relatively small (under 2MB) and will not be built anywhere near as often. In fact, the build host checks for updates every 20 minutes, where the rootfs build service is updated every 10 minutes.
As of this post, the latest rootfs and initramfs should leave your system in a functional state. Recent rootfs images have killed things like wifi and data due to radical changes in the generation script. That has now been fixed and things should settle down from here on.
As usual, please post helpful information to the XDANDROID Eclair thread. Thanks for reading and for testing!