[gentoo-user] Re: After /usr conflation: why not copy booting software to /sbin rather than initramfs?

"Mike Edenfield" <kutulu@××××××.org> writes:
>
> Yes , of course it's /possible/, it's just not /practical/.

Perhaps, but still?
I don't se how that is less practical than collecting them to a ramdisk?

Just do exactly the same steps up to the "cpio | gzip" -part

I do agree with most of what you say
>
> Most Linux users, by a vast but very silent majority, are plenty happy to
> put / and /usr on one partition, wipe their hands on their pants, and move
> on with life. Thus, the people developing and packaging those required boot
> packages can leave them right where they are, and everything works.

I agree with that.

> Some
> Linux users have reasons (largely legitimate ones) why this is not a valid
> option. Those users have three choices
>
> * Move the required packages away from their default installation locations
> on their machines, as you're suggestion, and fix the order of your boot
> scripts to mount /usr earlier than anything that needs it.
> * Install (or develop) alternative versions of the tools that do not have
> the same boot-time requirements, thus allowing you to ignore the whole mess.
> This is what Walt and his mdev team are making happen.
> * Use an initramfs to do whatever specific thing your machine(s) need to do
> to make the rest of the software work out-of-the-box.
>
> So, it's not a matter of one choice working and one not. It's a matter of
> one choice being much lower maintenance for the people donating their time
> to produce the software in the first place.

Yes, that is a very valid point.

> If someone (maybe you) were to
> figure out the actual steps needed to mount /usr early in the boot, without
> and initramfs, without swapping out udev for busybox or whatever, I'm sure a
> lot of people would be interested in seeing how that's done.  There's a
> possibility that it turns out to be way easier than anyone thought, and that
> supporting a split /usr becomes "no big deal". In practice, I'm going to
> guess that it turns out to be a way bigger maintenance nightmare (and
> probably more fragile) than:
>
> root # emerge dracut
> root # dracut -H

That's probably the way I'll proceed when I update udev later. But I'll
wait a while longer before doing that.

I'll going to miss the posibility of starting a kernel with only
init=/bin/bash for rescue purposes. But it's not a big deal.

>
> And probably won't be something that the developers or package maintainers
> are going to commit to supporting.
>
> --Mike

Thanks Mike.

This is my migration-plan

Today I have two disks with both three partitions

sda1 /    --  sdb1  reserve-root. Regulary rsynced from sda1
sda2 swap --  sdb2  swap
sda3 lvm  --  sdb3  lvm

sda3 and sdb3 is combined to the volume-group vg0, and I have all my
other filesystems in vg0.

I'm planing to create a vg0/root and copy the contents of / to that, and
later remove everything but /boot from the old /

How does that sound?

--
 Christer