> To me, the biggest reason to use initiramfs is if you want to have the > root fs on a sw raid device, e.g. md0. All the other reasons are fairly > exotic. root on lvm? why? On nfs? Maybe, but still exotic. > Encrypted? Data, yes, but why the root fs? >
We have to be careful here. What seems exotic to us may be mandatory to somebody else even if we don't agree with it. It's not really up to us to "judge" that one way or another. I like the educational information that is presented even if it goes into a hint vs. straight into the book. Even if making the root partition part of NFS or LVM is a bad idea to some, we can make our personal opinions known but that's it; only so somebody can make an educated decision themselves vs. us making one for them. A case in point: I have Linux servers at work that are a form of thin client. The servers themselves are virtualized and don't have a significant virtual harddrive attached to them. They have a tiny amount of storage presented to them by the hypervisor node they are on - enough to hold a couple of kernel images. The kernel loads an initramfs which in turn setups networking and runs an iscsi daemon to make an iSCSI connection to the SAN where it receives its network drives from including root. Technically speaking my root partitions aren't on NFS but on a SAN which, for this discussion's purpose, might as well be the same thing. Whether it's a good or bad thing to do it this way depends on whom you ask in the end. > There seems to be a trend in Linux to embrace the complex when simple > solutions will suffice for most people. The first exhibit is systemd. There is a balancing act, always has been and always will be, to how much complexity we expose our users to via the book. Anything above and beyond can always be added to supplementary information (and is always encouraged). Somebody else made an emergency shell comment which is another good benefit even if some people never use it. A local harddisk user can do "init=/bin/bash" and have his emergency shell. When you deal with servers that are setup as thin clients like mine, a shell offered by initramfs is virtually indispensable. From our book's point of view I still like the idea of exposing a basic initramfs. Just enough to give a shell and some useful utilities if decided upon. We can leave it to hints & user's own imagination to add RAID, LVM, iSCSI and other such capabilities. If we give a starting point, the community will run with it and find interesting new ways of doing things. Innovation is good. :) Gerard -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
