Gentoo Archives: gentoo-project

From: Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o>
To: gentoo-project@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-project] Council meeting: Tuesday 3 April 2012, 19:00 UTC
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:03:32
Message-Id: 20339.32619.8747.818708@a1i15.kph.uni-mainz.de
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-project] Council meeting: Tuesday 3 April 2012, 19:00 UTC by Sven Vermeulen
1 >>>>> On Tue, 27 Mar 2012, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
2
3 >> 3. New udev and separate /usr partition (30 minutes)
4 >>
5 >> See [4]: "Decide on whether a separate /usr is still a supported
6 >> configuration. If it is, newer udev can not be stabled and
7 >> alternatives should be investigated. If it isn't, a lot of
8 >> documentation will have to be updated. (And an alternative should
9 >> likely still be provided.)"
10
11 > Is it truely that much documentation? The handbook doesn't suggest
12 > separate /usr anymore (all example partitions use a single / file
13 > system), and the necessary changes to setup an initramfs are being
14 > prepared (cfr bugs related to bug #407959).
15
16 I've got a somewhat different impression, namely that it's still a
17 long way to go until the documentation will be sufficiently complete.
18
19 When updating my own systems (separate /usr partition, ext3 or ext4,
20 otherwise nothing special), I wasn't so happy with the status of the
21 documentation for the alternatives that are being discussed:
22
23 - dracut: I failed to find any documentation in our handbooks.
24 Anyway, dracut looks like overkill for my simple usage case.
25
26 - genkernel: Easy to use, but it doesn't include e2fsck with the
27 generated initramfs. Am I supposed to mount /usr without running
28 fsck on it first? Once the partition is mounted (even read-only),
29 e2fsck will refuse to run on it (so it also cannot be checked later
30 in the boot sequence). Again, I was unable to find any documentation
31 that would answer these questions.
32
33 So finally I ended up building my own initramfs, using information
34 from the wiki and from forums.
35
36 > We might want to provide an initramfs-guide to explain the concepts
37 > and the various methods for generating one (as well as debugging),
38 > but that too might not be the most difficult thing out there
39 > (there's still time for that, no)?
40
41 IMHO this has to be done before >=udev-180 can be stabilised.
42
43 Ulrich

Replies