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

Fri Dec 2 13:06:15 CET 2011

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
+