On Thursday, September 15, 2011 04:54:38 PM Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 4:40 PM, Joost Roeleveld <joost@...> wrote:
> > It is my understanding all the options need to be specified every time
> > dracut
> > is run to create an initramfs. If this becomes mandatory, will this be
> > added
> > to the "make" script of the kernel-sources and as such, make this more
> > specific?
> 
> There are no plans to make dracut mandatory, unless you're putting root on
> lvm or luks or something, and a good initramfs is already needed for that.
> 
> I think /etc/dracut.conf already has just about anything you'd want to be
> persistent across runs.

That would be a good starting point. Having to type a lengthy commandline each 
time I update the kernel and/or toolstack will become troublesome and problems 
will easily occur.

Will the ebuild automatically add all the different modules into the 
/etc/dracut.conf ?
Please note, I am asking these questions to put my mind at ease and hopefully 
be able to explain all this back to the people on gentoo-user. 

> > Another issue arrises where some of the tools are updated that are also
> > in the
> > initramfs. Will we then still need to remember to also update the
> > initramfs if
> > these are needed?
> 
> Potentially - if the tools in the initramfs won't work.  That seems unlikely
> though - on-disk formats don't really change much and all stuff like mdadm
> and lvm tools do is find stuff and pass it along to the kernel which does
> the real work.  If you migrate your root from raid1 to raid17 and the old
> initramfs doesn't understand raid17 then you'll have a problem.  I imagine
> that if you migrate to raid17, however, you'd have put some thought into
> this.

Migrating to raid17 (mirrored raid7, where there can be 3 failed disks per 
raid7?) would require some thought already.

> > My server currently uses mdadm raid1 for /, /boot and swap and raid1+lvm
> > for
> > the rest. This works without the need of an initramfs.
> > 
> > Will this still work? Or will I need to be using dracut instead?
> 
> I suspect that if /usr is on raid1+lvm that you might need dracut.  I'm not
> 100% sure on that, since in theory the initramfs can find all it needs on
> root in this case.  However, the goal was to keep it simple. I'd defer to
> somebody actually involved with the simple image.

If this is the case, then, to me, this is a major regression. As the current 
toolstack does not need an initramfs. All the lvm-tools are installed on / by 
default. None of the required tools are under /usr.

--
Joost