On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 3:54 PM, Phillip Susi <[email protected]> wrote:
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> I was a bit confused when I saw this uds event.  It is unclear to me why we 
> would want to add upstart to the initramfs.  I think it is important to 
> remember that the the whole purpose of the initramfs is to help the kernel 
> find the root fs, so things that aren't needed to access the root fs really 
> shouldn't be there, lest it add bloat and slow down booting.  After listening 
> to the audio of the session, it seems like there are a few issues people are 
> trying to address with upstart in the initramfs:
>
> 1)  Want to fix bugs with mdadm/luks
>
> I don't see what this has to do with upstart at all.  If your root is 
> encrypted, then you must prompt for the password before you can continue, so 
> there is no reason to do this event driven rather than procedural.  Luks 
> volumes not mounted at boot should be handled by udisks or something that can 
> interact with the desktop.  mdadm, dmraid, and lvm have already been 
> converted to event driven and handled via udev and are done the same in both 
> the initramfs and in the real system.  The criticism I have of the current 
> system there is that they are automatically added to the initramfs when 
> installed.  The multipath-tools package has a separate -boot flavor that 
> handles copying the binaries and udev rules to the initramfs only if you 
> require it to boot.  I think mdadm, dmraid, cryptsetup, and lvm should follow 
> that same model to avoid adding things to the initramfs that aren't needed 
> there.

So a related issue is dmraid, which is very similar to mdadm. My last
two dmraid machines fail - every time - to activate on boot. The
reason being that the devices they depend upon don't come up fast
enough, and the configuration process isn't event-driven *enough* to
cope; so I type 'dmraid -ay' on every boot. (I've put some time into
fixing it, but as I reboot these machines very rarely, it hasn't hit
my 'fix it now dammit' threshold.) [My third most distant dmraid box
wouldn't boot because the BIOS raid signature wasn't recognised...
that one I fixed asap, I like my disk sizes being calculated correctly
:P]

I'm not saying we should put upstart in the initramfs, just supplying
some data for the discussion :)

-Rob

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