On Jan 13, 2012, at 10:43 PM, Jeremy Huntwork wrote: > For most LFS uses, you're building the entire system for one machine and in > that case, an initramfs or early boot options like it aren't really that > crucial, because you're likely to build just the drivers you need into the > kernel itself and so mounting root is no issue.
While I agree that server vs. desktop is not the issue, you guys really need to
try the modern disk management tools -- LVM or ZFS or anything similar. It's
worth the hassle, I promise. Even if you decide you don't care on your system,
you should at least understand why it's becoming the standard.
Even if you don't care about RAID, and you don't care about encryption -- both
of which are increasingly relevant -- LVM just makes regular administration
easier. It's less arcane, it's less limiting, and it has genuinely useful new
features that you simply can't get with traditional, partition-based disk
management systems.
Want to move to a new disk -- attach it, tell LVM to migrate off the old one,
pull the old disk. Is the new disk bigger -- tell LVM and your file system to
expand and poof: more storage. Need a new partition -- don't muck with some
archaic table and numbered slices of disk, just tell LVM how much storage you
want and give it a name. No need to worry about partition fragmentation. No
need to worry about MBR vs. GPT. Want to add a second disk to enable RAID-1 --
build a degraded array on the new disk, tell LVM to remove the old one, add the
old disk to the new array. And all this without even unmounting a file system,
let alone rebooting.
You don't strictly need initramfs to do LVM; you can built a non-LVM root and
mount other LVM-enabled volumes from there. But initramfs makes life easier --
rather giving up all the advantages of LVM for the root partition and using
two different sets of disk tools to build your system you can build the whole
system in LVM and forget all the old tools and procedures. I literally never
ever use fdisk or parted for anything other than creating a BIOS-readable boot
partition to store the kernel and my initramfs, and I'll give that up in a
second when someone taught EFI how to read LVM.
To be fair, GRUB 2 can read LVM. But it does that by having it's own partition
and loading LVM drivers from there -- it's functionally the same as using an
initramfs to find the root FS. And so long as you're using a multi-stage boot
I'd personally I'd prefer the flexibility of an initramfs over the limited
environment of GRUB.
Zach
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