Re: [gentoo-dev] separate /usr without initramfs

[Dale]

William Hubbs wrote:
> Hi Dale,
>
> I would like to call your attention to a couple of things in my message.
>
> On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 01:40:10PM -0500, Dale wrote:
>> William Hubbs wrote:
> *snip*
>
>>> I want to hear from people who have / and /usr on separate partitions
>>> and who are not using an initramfs.
>>>
>>> If you are in this group, I have a very specific question. Why aren't
>>> you using an initramfs?
> *snip*
>
>> I have a separate /usr among others and always have.  The reason I do
>> that, /boot and / are normal partitions but everything else is LVM.  I
>> can adjust the size of everything BUT /boot and /.  At the time I did
>> that, the init thingy was not needed if I recall correctly.  I might
>> add, I've had to grow /usr and /var a couple times.  Before LVM, it
>> meant copying over to another drive, repartitioning and then restoring
>> to the old drive.  Time consuming and one wrong command could ruin a
>> install.
>>
>> While I have a init thingy, I do not like it.  I've had a couple
>> failures already with those things.  Luckily I keep older kernels and
>> such for that.  If I had my wish, I would not need a init thingy, ever. 
>> It's just one more thing that can cause problems.  There's already more
>> than enough things that can break.  While I understand the problem comes
>> from upstream, I still think it sucks.  It's easy enough to have a
>> unbootable kernel as it is.  Adding another layer for booting to fail
>> should be avoided.  BTW, I use dracut.  I tried to build it other ways
>> but couldn't get it to work.  Bad thing is, when one fails even built
>> with dracut, I have no clue how it works really so no idea how to fix
>> other than using a older kernel or just rerunning dracut and hoping for
>> the best.
>
>  You just stated that you have an initramfs, so you did not thoroughly
>  read my message. I specifically asked to hear from folks who aren't
>  using one. All of this is irrelivent since you are.
>
>> I'm also not looking forward to the other situation you mentioned
>> either.  At some point, having separate partitions won't be easy with or
>> without a init thingy.  I can't easily resize / without reworking the
>> whole thing.
>
>  Like I said above, separate partitions without an initramfs has been
>  broken for many years. We have been doing some downstream hacking that
>  made it work for some people. You are obviously not one of those people
>  since you use an initramfs.
>
> Can you please not add irrelivent noise to this thread?
>
>  William


I did read your message.  The reason I posted, I wish I did NOT have to
have one and I was in the situation you describe.  From what people
post, here and elsewhere, my system may not boot without one.  So, if it
is possible to NOT have a init thingy, I'd love to see that supported. 

I might also add, I originally thought this was on -user not -dev.  I
did see that wrong. 

Dale

:-)  :-)