[Mageia-dev] RFC: Drop mkinitrd completely in favour of dracut.

[Thomas Backlund]

Colin Guthrie skrev 2.12.2011 13:28:
> Hi,
>
> Just a suggestion! Should we move wholesale to dracut?
>
> It's very easy to hack on, and Harald Hoyer has been very helpful and
> has merged some of the patches we carried locally (which I mostly copied
> from Mandriva). Not sure why they were not upstreamed before.
>
> There are still a couple patches we carry locally (soon to be less when
> Harald pushes his git repo and I rebase), but they are pretty trivial,
> understandable and easily maintainable (mostly they will be stylistic
> tweaks and naming variations - i.e. very minor).
>
> Modprobe rules are included even in the initrd so tweaks there follow
> through.
>
> I'm not necessarily against keeping mkinitrd, but I think we should take
> the time from now until the beta phase to obsolte mkinitrd and force
> everyone to use dracut in order to see if there are any issues and then
> make the call before next beta or rc.


Well, one thing dracut (or maybe it's systemd, I havent had time to 
debug yet) is not able to do so far is to boot up a dmraid setup with
2 raid1 (2x 2 disks) setup...

if there is anthing in fstab referencing the second raid1 disk pair
the boot stops. I currently work around it by manually activating and
mounting the second raid set after the system is booted.

This could maybe be fixed by not using dmraid anymore for
Intel imsm raid, but instead let mdadm handle it.
But that also means modifying the installer for that part.

The good part of using dracut over mkinitrd with dmraid setups is
that dracut uses the real dmraid to activate/access the raid,
so it can boot even if one disk has failed. mkinitrd uses a stripped
down dmraid support in nash that crashes on boot if one disk is
missing.


Other than that I haven't seen any problems with dracut so far.

--
Thomas