Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Question about genkernel's default kernel config

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 10:54 AM, Ian Zimmerman <itz@××××.org> wrote:
>
> So, can anyone explain why dracut is better than genkernel for _that_
> particular subtask?
>

Focusing purely on dracut vs genkernel:

The main advantage of dracut is that it is a cross-distro tool that
gets a lot more attention in general (being used by multiple distros I
believe).  I know it does things like copy your mdadm.conf and fstab
to the initramfs and tries to use existing configurations like these.
It probably supports a larger number of targets as well (like various
network-based roots).

It is also more modular.  While it was rightly said that the
documentation is more reference-level than howto-level it is
straightforward to drop in your own modules if you need them.  If you
include all the modules in most cases it can figure out what to do on
its own.

However, ultimately both tools just boot the system and then go away,
so if your system is booting, it isn't like it will boot "better" with
one tool than the other.  There are a few nice-to-haves with dracut
(and perhaps also with genkernel), but I don't think they're going to
sway somebody.  Something I like about dracut is that when I'm
shutting down systemd actually pivots back to the initramfs and it
unmounts root, which I think is more elegant than mounting ro, but in
practice the latter works.

For me the main driver is using something fairly standard vs something
Gentoo-specific.

-- 
Rich