On Thursday, September 15, 2011 04:54:38 PM Rich Freeman wrote: > On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 4:40 PM, Joost Roeleveld <jo...@antarean.org> wrote: > > It is my understanding all the options need to be specified every time > > dracut > > is run to create an initramfs. If this becomes mandatory, will this be > > added > > to the "make" script of the kernel-sources and as such, make this more > > specific? > > There are no plans to make dracut mandatory, unless you're putting root on > lvm or luks or something, and a good initramfs is already needed for that. > > I think /etc/dracut.conf already has just about anything you'd want to be > persistent across runs.
That would be a good starting point. Having to type a lengthy commandline each time I update the kernel and/or toolstack will become troublesome and problems will easily occur. Will the ebuild automatically add all the different modules into the /etc/dracut.conf ? Please note, I am asking these questions to put my mind at ease and hopefully be able to explain all this back to the people on gentoo-user. > > Another issue arrises where some of the tools are updated that are also > > in the > > initramfs. Will we then still need to remember to also update the > > initramfs if > > these are needed? > > Potentially - if the tools in the initramfs won't work. That seems unlikely > though - on-disk formats don't really change much and all stuff like mdadm > and lvm tools do is find stuff and pass it along to the kernel which does > the real work. If you migrate your root from raid1 to raid17 and the old > initramfs doesn't understand raid17 then you'll have a problem. I imagine > that if you migrate to raid17, however, you'd have put some thought into > this. Migrating to raid17 (mirrored raid7, where there can be 3 failed disks per raid7?) would require some thought already. > > My server currently uses mdadm raid1 for /, /boot and swap and raid1+lvm > > for > > the rest. This works without the need of an initramfs. > > > > Will this still work? Or will I need to be using dracut instead? > > I suspect that if /usr is on raid1+lvm that you might need dracut. I'm not > 100% sure on that, since in theory the initramfs can find all it needs on > root in this case. However, the goal was to keep it simple. I'd defer to > somebody actually involved with the simple image. If this is the case, then, to me, this is a major regression. As the current toolstack does not need an initramfs. All the lvm-tools are installed on / by default. None of the required tools are under /usr. -- Joost
