On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 08:35:46PM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote: > On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 5:31 PM, Joshua Kinard <ku...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > Never once have I had any issues > > with separate / and /usr, and none of them use an initramfs. > Ditto here, but that doesn't mean that problems don't exist. Right now the > problems are likely to be subtle, perhaps arising only with certain > combinations of hardware/etc. Maybe if you had a bluetooth keyboard or > something it might not work, or maybe if /usr were mounted on a bluetooth > hard drive or something (do they even make those?). Bluetooth keyboard wanted during early boot (to put in the root password for a fsck repair after a hard shutdown) is one that bit me already.
> > As far as initramfs, is this something that would need to go into the > > kernel? > Well, the kernel comes with code for making an initramfs, but most likely it > would be implemented in a separate package. The initramfs isn't part of the > kernel - it is loaded by grub at boot time and its address is passed to the > kernel. So, the file needs to be on /boot. That's not always true, see further down. > I also netboot some of my systems, and they have limits on the total > > size of the kernel image (7.2MB on one, ~40MB on another, etc), hence the > > need to keep this small or find another way to do things. > I think that pxelinux supports initramfs - I know it supports initrd at > least and I don't think it makes any difference at the bootloader level. In > fact, things like network booting are one of the drivers behind the Fedora > project to have dracut mount /usr. Their plan is to just move everything > into /usr, allow it to be NFS-mounted, and then with one mountpoint > everything the system needs is available. Eventually in Fedora /lib and > /bin will just be symlinks into /usr. That will work fine as long as dracut > mounts /usr. That's not quite as easy for Kumba... Some of the MIPS bootloaders are very limited. At least one of them requires that the initramfs be built INTO the kernel. > > Are there possibilities about breaking off just a small piece of openrc and > > putting that into /run (or /boot)? Enough of the core scripts so that it > > can find /usr and mount it before continuing? > Well, it certainly could be done, but it doesn't seem to be the direction > anybody else is going. Instead the plan is to just create a very minimal > initramfs that gets the job done. That's pretty much the only stuff in WilliamH's prototype. Just enough to get /usr mounted (/run comes for almost free at that point basically, it's just mounting tmpfs on /newroot/run/). -- Robin Hugh Johnson Gentoo Linux: Developer, Trustee & Infrastructure Lead E-Mail : robb...@gentoo.org GnuPG FP : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85
