Kernel building questions

[Lee Revell]

I'm trying to build a 2.6.17 kernel "the Ubuntu way" with the -rt patch.

I've noticed a few weird things.

First, mkinitrd is not available at all by default - it's only in
universe.  How could such a critical package be officially unsupported?
Is there a replacement I am not aware of?

Second, I noticed that the generated initrd expects devfs to be present.
But it's been deprecated for well over a year, and is not available at
all in the last few kernel releases.

Am I doing something wrong?

Lee