On Sat, Apr 09, 2016 at 07:11:31AM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote > It was simply a recognition that we were already in a state where > booting a system without /usr mounted early can cause problems.
For certain edge cases... yes. But they were already using initramfs or merging /usr into /. I'm talking about the 95% who don't really need it. > I never really got the mentality that using an initramfs is a burden. One more piece of software that can go wrong. You have to maintain+configure it; e.g. sync software and library versions with what's on the rest of the system. > An initramfs is just a secondary bootloader for userspace. I almost > always use them even if I'm just booting a VM with a single partition > on it. If something goes wrong you can fall back to a shell in the > initramfs and it is like having a rescue disk built into your system > disk. There is single-user mode for rescue. > For a more complex setup it is much more robust than relying on > the kernel to find your root, and it also lets you build with a more > module-based kernel, which has some benefits as well even if you build > kernels tailored to each host. I have "Production" and "Experimental" entries in my LILO menu. A new kernel is always set up as the "Experimental" entry. After running several days without problems, I run a script which copies the data from the "Experimental" portion to "Production". The only time my system had problems "finding root" was years ago when the switch from /dev/hd* to /dev/sd* took place. The "Experimental" boot with the new kernel died. I booted "Production", read the mailing list, changed "hd" to "sd" for the "Experimental" entry, and rebooted. After several days without problems, I made the same change to the "Production" entry, and copied the "Experimental" portion to "Production". -- Walter Dnes <[email protected]> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
