'Twas brillig, and Charles A Edwards at 27/01/12 01:06 did gyre and gimble: > It was my understanding that mkinitrd would continue to be supported in > Mageia2 and then be phased out during the Mageia3 development. > > If this is the case, why is it that all 'current' kernels now > require dracut?
Basically, if you want to use mkinitrd in mga2, you'll also have to use sysvinit. I will not be supporting a systemd system with an mkinitrd initrd. This is because systemd is fully hotplug, and thus does not just "try and do things" and hope for the best. It waits until it knows devices are available before using them. It does this via udev. If anything mildly exotic is used (e.g. LVM, RAID etc.) then it is the initrd's job to start these. If it's done in an mkinitrd, the metadata generated from activating these devices is lost as udev is not running at the time. In dracut, udev is running and critical metadata is saved and preserved for systemd to use later. So, with the background of why I will not support systemd+mkinitrd out of the way, we have to look at the kernels themselves. We require dracut now, but it's still perfectly possible to install mkinitrd and set the alternatives up correctly such that it is used (update-alternatives --display mkinitrd). If you do this, you are on your own - you need to remember to install sysvinit and not let systemd be your init. The original question is "why does the kernel require dracut?" Well, it's our preferred initrd but, as mentioned above, you can still use mkinitrd if you absolutely must, but you have to know the consequences and repercussions. I originally made dracut fully obsolete mkinitrd, giving no choice in the matter. This is still my preferred option for mga2 if at all possible, but as I believe others want to keep it for now, I'm fine with it. The kernel requires dracut to make sure that the default init system (systemd) and the kernel initrd (made with dracut) are paired. Hope that answers your question. Col -- Colin Guthrie colin(at)mageia.org http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/ Open Source: Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/ PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/ Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
