On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 10:19 AM, Steven J Long <sl...@rathaus.eclipse.co.uk> wrote: > I was under the impression that anyone using lvm+raid (+luks) on root > already has an initramfs, and there are docs out there about that, but sure, > improving those docs and the software is always a good idea.
Anybody running root on lvm+raid(+luks) is already using an initramfs. However, the guide I linked does not run root on lvm/luks - just on raid1, which does not require an initramfs. That guide puts everything BUT root on LVM, assuming that baselayout/sysvinit/openrc on root can mount everything else. The existing initramfs tools do not yet mount /usr regardless. I'm sure RedHat and others pursing a read-only /usr required at time of boot will be looking to rectify this, so Gentoo is moving along with upstream for dracut/etc here. > Yeah I've been using lvm for several years now, with a separate /usr and no > initramfs, though not on root. For the last few months, I've been running > with the tweaked udev startup scripts I mentioned before, so /usr is mounted > before udev starts (which is possible since I don't have any requirement on > udev-initialised hardware to mount local drives.) That's basically my configuration as well. However, I don't really want to set the goal of making Gentoo support my own configuration. In any case, having a more robust initramfs solution for separate /usr should support this and many other configurations. > > Regardless of the ability to backup just /usr, I'm still not convinced about > moving every binary there. It certainly isn't necessary, in that the > packages we install respect prefix, and there's no need to change the > ebuilds to make packages work; further most admins already have their own > backup scripts in-place. I think that the path of least resistance is to move with upstream - let's not try to force everything into /usr unless that becomes a consensus with many other distros. However, we can at least look to accomodate things like udev that are moving in this direction so that it doesn't create sparks within Gentoo. > > I for one, would like to be able to run in single-user mode off just the > rootfs, in case for instance, something goes wrong with lvm and /usr won't > mount; and I don't want to duplicate all those utilities in an initramfs. If > that's not going to be possible, fair enough: that's life. > I hear you. No harm in supporting this as long as seems reasonable, but you're going to be stuck without udev from the sound of things, and that is a lot to lose. You should give dracut a shot - it does quite a bit automagically though for some reason it doesn't set up my raid properly (I can do it with a simple mdadm --assemble --scan from the dracut shell), and it doesn't mount /usr yet. So, it isn't there, but it does quite a bit just the same. Rich
