On Fri, Aug 05, 2011 at 09:57:08AM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote:
> In any case, as long as a solution exists for md+lvm+luks+/usr before
> we start breaking more stuff than is already broken, then we should be
> fine. Having more than one optional solution is fine. While I don't
> think that gentoo needs to be another Ubuntu, having reasonable
> out-of-the-box support for one of the major desktop environments
> running on md+lvm+luks seems pretty useful.
My proposed minimal initramfs is an alternative to dracut for users with
trivial systems. For _ALL_ of the other cases, genkernel/dracut should
be used. Patches to add any of that other support to the minimal
initramfs will be rejected.
Definition of a trivial system:
/, /usr, /var are contained on or within device nodes available in
devtmpfs at the time the kernel invokes the initramfs.
Examples of non-trivial systems:
- {/, /usr, /var} on any of LVM, LUKS, NFS, iSCSI
- {/, /usr, /var} on MD that is not auto-assembled by the kernel [1].
- etc.
The initramfs would be rebuilt extremely infrequently, since it doesn't
contain any kernel modules, and reads the actual configuration from the
real root fs.
[1]: Upstream MD kernel folk have said everybody wanting to do MD
detection should migrate to initramfs for detection, as there at lot of
corner cases in detection where userspace is needed to make a sane
decision. Also if you use non-msdos partition tables, or large MDs.
--
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux: Developer, Trustee & Infrastructure Lead
E-Mail : robb...@gentoo.org
GnuPG FP : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85
