Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: locations of binaries and separate /usr

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Jan 1, 2012 at 4:45 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote:
> This is my issue as well.  I tried to make a init* to deal with this and
> have yet to get one to work, not one single working boot up.  I have tried
> different howtos and not one of them produced anything that works.  I have
> not found a dracut howto that makes any sense either.  Sorry but genkernel
> left a bad taste in my mouth ages ago.

While I think that the direction we're moving in (/usr on root or use
an initramfs) is inevitable, I do agree that it needs some
improvement.

I've gotten Dracut to work fine in VMs (even with fairly complex
setups), but every time I try it on my server it doesn't set up the
raid for some reason, and drops me to a dash shell.  If I just run
mdadm_auto at that point it takes about 15 seconds to find and setup
my raid, and just typing exit boots the system just fine.  I keep it
as an option in grub so that whenever my raid device numbers get mixed
up (seems to happen every other month for no apparent reason) I can
boot the system, since dracut does use the mdadm.conf and UUIDs to put
everything in the right place and find the right root (something you
can't do without an initramfs).  One of these days I'll figure out how
to hack an mdadm_auto into the script as a last-ditch measure and then
I'll just have to deal with a one-minute delay.

For being the wave of the future it seems like the only documentation
Dracut has is a single page website with a few paragraphs of info.

I think the bottom line is that the future may look inevitable, but it
isn't actually here yet.  I advocate being ready for the future, but
let's try not to force its arrival before everything is mature (though
having it in portage as an option is completely in the spirit of
Gentoo).

Rich