On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 1:56 PM, Mike Gilbert <flop...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > Ah, good to know. I'm used to dealing with my little homegrown > initramfs, where I parse root from the kernel command line in /init. > genkernel does the same thing.
Yeah, dracut generally "does the right thing" but that generally assumes that things like fstab are correct. It still uses the root= option (I'm not sure if it can work without it - I believe it does snapshot the fstab at time of creation). My understanding is that dracut actually remounts root a few times as it moves along, starting with the kernel command line, then after setting up mounts in fstab.sys (which is how you handle a separate /usr), and finally based on the contents of fstab (which it can't read until it actually has root mounted). When it is done the root filesystem is mounted using all options in /etc/fstab, which is probably a good thing. That said, it hasn't been without bugs. I think they're mostly fixed at this point, but I haven't tried removing all of my workarounds (mainly around the fact that it wasn't auto-assembling my raid unless I hardcoded an mdadm -As in a script). The best thing about dracut though is that it is pretty powerful, with modules/hooks/etc. When it wasn't quite working right for me I just added my own module to it. It also has the side-benefit of working well even when mdadm decides to renumber all my md minor device numbers (tends to happen when booting for CD or whatever - probably because I'm using older metadata for some of the arrays). Rich
