init not found pass init= to kernel

So you’ve rolled your own kernel, you’re maybe trying to build a ramdisk or something, and you’re faced with “init not found, try passing init= to kernel”. And you’ve tried everything else, you’ve looked forever.

What worked for me was suddenly remembering that the 2.6.x series of the kernel uses a cpio archive as an initial ram disk, not  a file that has been formatted with a file system. I mounted my file as a loop device and then created a cpio archive from it. Suddenly init could be found! A MIRACLE I TELLYA

Of course, this hasn’t solved the problem I have that init cannot be executed, but I suspect that’s a kernel misconfiguration….