On Wed, 2026-05-06 at 12:26 +0200, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote: > Hi, > > On Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:27:33 +0200 Michael Prokop <[email protected]> wrote: > > * Christian Kastner [Sat Apr 11, 2026 at 09:41:55AM +0200]: > > > On 2026-04-10 23:59, Benjamin Drung wrote: > > > > On Wed, 2026-04-08 at 12:45 +0200, Benjamin Drung wrote: > > > > > On Wed, 2026-04-08 at 12:06 +0200, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote: > > > > > > > > IMO detection of the chroot is a good approach. We already have > > > > > > various software pieces that behave differently when they detect a > > > > > > chroot (systemctl, glibc postinst, etc). > > > > > > > > > > > > I think this would also help users that run in a rescue environment, > > > > > > as (per my limited understanding), hostonly would also likely > > > > > > produce something that won't boot. > > > > > > The discussed solution in dracut: > > > > https://github.com/dracut-ng/dracut-ng/pull/2369 > > > > > > > > In case this patch is applied in dracut, autopkgtest-build-qemu should > > > > set this environment variable during the build: > > > > > > > > DRACUT_EXTRA_ARGS=--no-hostonly > > > > > While an option, I'm not entirely sure if autopkgtest is the correct > > > place to do this. The actual image build happens through the lower-level > > > vmdb2, so fixing the problem generally would probably require fixing it > > > in vmdb2. > > > > > > Looping the autopkgtest and vmdb2 maintainers in, in case they see this > > > differently. > > > > I'd like to highlight and echo Chris' (Hofstaedtler) comment: > > > > > As I wrote earlier, I believe this is non-ideal. Each image builder > > > will have to learn it, and each image builder will do something > > > different. You'll end up with various configurations in the wild > > > that you don't know that they exist. > > > > *Please* let's avoid a solution for which every single image > > builder tool needs to special case things. > > > > (Speaking with my hat as author of grml-debootstrap (which exists > > since 2006) and project lead of the Grml rescue live system, and > > being a previous contributor and maintainer of initramfs-tools. > > Please don't think about autopkgtest + vmdb2 only, there are *many* image > > builder tools around.) > > I would like to add another "me too" to what ch and mika said. I am > maintaining > quite a few "image builders" and just ran into this problem with one of them. > This used to work automatically before dracut came along. It can thus > evidently > be solved automatically. It is an anti-feature to now make all image builders > set another environment variable just so that dracut is happy. As ch pointed > out, this means that I also have to backport such a change to earlier versions > of Debian so that Debian stable or oldstable is able to create a dracut image > for testing and unstable. Please fix this problem in one place (in dracut) > instead of forcing a lot of maintainers to do busy-work.
Can you give me psaudo-code or logic how to determine when dracut should default to build a generic initrd and when it can build a host-only initrd? -- Benjamin Drung Debian & Ubuntu Developer
