On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 8:51 AM, Ian Stakenvicius <a...@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 21/12/12 03:10 AM, J. Roeleveld wrote:
>
>> An init* needs to be kept in sync with the rest of the system as
>> well.
>
> Just to be clear, by "init*" you mean {initrd,initramfs} , correct?Seems likely. However, for the most part it really only needs to be kept in sync with the kernel. Smarter ones like dracut that might do things like keep a copy of mdadm.conf internally might need to be updated when your disks change, and so on. In general, however, they only need changes when either your kernel changes, or the path to the root filesystem changes (by path I mean mdadm/lvm/nfs/etc). Everything inside the initramfs is self-contained and does not have dependencies on anything outside. Sure, it might not have the latest version of udev inside or whatever, but unless you need the latest version of udev to mount root it isn't a problem. The contents of the initramfs are generally discarded once root and /usr are mounted. However, I can vouch that an initramfs can make things interesting if you do move your root filesystem. I just moved mine to lvm and forgot to update fstab.sys. Dracut does pay attention to your root filesystem in fstab and fstab.sys - it uses the kernel line to find root, but once it is mounted fstab gets read and used to remount it. Oh, and if fstab and fstab.sys have differing root lines both get sort-of-mounted (it mounts what is in fstab, and then mounts fstab.sys over it as far as I can tell - running mount and finding that you have /sysroot mounted on a mountpoint that you can't even get to is fun). But, I wouldn't be running root on lvm but for the initramfs, so it was worth the trouble. Anybody who moves around root without a boot CD handy is asking for trouble anyway. Rich
