OK, so this took me a while to actually get around to setting up some VMs to test this. Sorry about that :s
Anyway, I've tested with a / on ext4 + /usr on LVM + ext4. With appropriate fixes, I was able to generate an initrd without any specific config to tell dracut what to do. There is a caveat. /usr is mounted read only. I can tweak this, but by the same token I'm not sure I should... It's trivial to do a "mount -o remount,rw /usr" if you want to install packages etc. Otherwise, /usr should pretty much be read only anyway.. if something tries to modify stuff on /usr that's not part of a package installation process that is (IMO) a bug and should be fixed. The code for mounting /usr is not the same as how it'll (eventually) be done upstream. It only deals with /usr and if you have e.g. /usr/bin on a separate partition they you are SOL and will have to wait for the upstream version. I think however that for the majority of setups the current solutions is likely good enough. Now, when I installed, dracut wasn't used as initrd, so if no one shouts too loudly I'll make it deprecate mkinitrd tomorrow and we can test installs where dracut generates the first initrd and see how it fairs. Please test and let me know. It's version 014.1mga2 Col -- Colin Guthrie colin(at)mageia.org http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/ Open Source: Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/ PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/ Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/