Re: [gentoo-dev] usr merge

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 1:32 AM,  <waltdnes@××××××××.org> wrote:
>
> now - an arbitrary decree comes down that *EVERYBODY* who wants a
> separate /usr needs to have initramfs.
>

The "decree" wasn't some kind of law that the Gentoo police will come
out to your house and arrest you for violating.

It was simply a recognition that we were already in a state where
booting a system without /usr mounted early can cause problems.  There
isn't really any solution to these problems (other than moving most of
/usr into /, which I doubt is the desire of anybody who puts /usr on a
separate filesystem), and it probably will only get worse.

The intent of the resolution was to not burden package maintainers to
have to cater to a use case that was already failing.

And the wording of the resolution doesn't mention the word "initramfs"
at all, precisely because we recognized that there were many ways to
work around the problem.

If you have concerns about the decision being arbitrary you might want
to read the original summary:
https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20130813-summary.txt

and log:
https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20130813.txt

And of course you can read the list archives from the time where the
issue was extensively discussed.

> * IT DOES NOT MAKE THINGS ANY EASIER FOR THE ORIGINAL 5% EDGE CASES *.
> But the other 95% who could run separate /usr are now being told they
> must run initramfs "just because".  What does it accomplish?

I never really got the mentality that using an initramfs is a burden.

You can boot a kernel as an EFI program, but the reality is that many
if not most users of linux on EFI use a secondary bootloader.  Heck,
back in the old days you could actually boot linux directly from the
BIOS without any secondary bootloader, but this was so impractical
that even Linus now tells people to:
bugger_off_msg:
        .ascii  "Use a boot loader.\r\n"
        .ascii  "\n"
        .ascii  "Remove disk and press any key to reboot...\r\n"
        .byte   0
(and I must say that I admire the man with the guts to not insert a
carriage return when the carriage is already on the first column)

An initramfs is just a secondary bootloader for userspace.  I almost
always use them even if I'm just booting a VM with a single partition
on it.  If something goes wrong you can fall back to a shell in the
initramfs and it is like having a rescue disk built into your system
disk.  For a more complex setup it is much more robust than relying on
the kernel to find your root, and it also lets you build with a more
module-based kernel, which has some benefits as well even if you build
kernels tailored to each host.


-- 
Rich