[gentoo-soc] Dracut port - weekly progress - week 1

[Amadeusz Żołnowski]

Hello everyone,

The past week I spend digging into Dracut test suites, playing with
QEMU and doing yet another kernel recompilation, adjusting USE flags
and other similar things. Tests don't involving networking run well on
Fedora. When trying to port them to Gentoo I met several problems.

The first problem is that Dracut isn't willing to load drivers on
Gentoo. The second is that Dracut doesn't report anything on failures –
when it cannot load specified module or driver – and it's that which
hides the reason of the first problem. I reported it to Harald Hoyer
and appropriate bug report [0] was created. That's the first thing I
have to handle before doing anything else with Dracut.

In meanwhile I put common functions in test scripts into one file and
another for configuration to ease managing. Moreover I identified some
differences between Fedora and Gentoo. The general problem is that
Gentoo user usually customize kernel for the host as much as possible.
For QEMU (including test suites requirements) following options should
be turned on:

    * Processor family: 586/K5/5x86/6x86/6x86MX and Generic x86 support
    * Legacy PCI
    * Intel IDE drivers (MPIIX/PIIX)
    * NBD, NFS, iSCSI
    * Serial console
    * Device mapper + Crypt target
    * RAID

And of course appropriate tools are required.

This week I'm starting with digging directly in Dracut – firstly to fix
issue mentioned above. If I made Dracut to run quite smoothly under
Gentoo I'll continue with test-suites – probably in parallel.

Resources:

    * http://github.com/aidecoe/dracut (my fork; for test-suites it's
      branch test)
    * https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=dracut
    * http://bugs.gentoo.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=dracut
    * http://blog.aidecoe.name/category/gentoo/

References:

    [0] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=595671


-- 
Cheers,
Amadeusz Żołnowski

PGP key: 1024D/C284750D