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

Sat Dec 3 15:39:37 CET 2011

On 03.12.2011 08:05, Thomas Backlund wrote:
+> Anssi Hannula skrev 3.12.2011 01:06:
+>> On 03.12.2011 00:18, Thomas Backlund wrote:
+>>> Anssi Hannula skrev 2.12.2011 23:17:
+>>>>
+>>>> Patch attached. I guess this would remain as a Mageia specific patch as
+>>>> the wanted behavior is dependant on how the distribution handles driver
+>>>> switching etc...
+>>>
+>>> Speaking of driver switching...
+>>>
+>>> Is it possible to detect missing radeon firmware in initrd in early
+>>> boot, and then switch to loading radeon with modeset=0 ?
+>>
+>> Seems doable (if a bit hacky), but unfortunately new radeon cards (at
+>> least cayman/northern islands) do not work without KMS at all (while
+>> slightly older cards like Evergreen mostly work but without any kind of
+>> 2d/3d acceleration).
+>>
+> 
+> Yeah, I started thinking about those too after my post...
+> 
+>> This also means that X server will fail to start since it doesn't
+>> fallback to autodetection (and therefore vesa) when the card is
+>> explicitely listed in xorg.conf.
+>>
+>> Not quite sure what is the best way forward.
+>>
+> 
+> Hm, so we would need a split in detection for nonkms capable cards
+> and the rest...
+> 
+> or take the easy way out and boot everyone on vesa until radeon firmware
+> is available...
+
+Does loading of radeon modesetting kernel driver without firmware break
+the boot completely, or does it just make X.org server fail to start?
+
+>> BTW, shouldn't we regenerate initrds when installing radeon-firmware for
+>> the first time?
+>>
+> 
+> Yeah, I've been thinking the same, but haven't gotten around to doing it
+> yet.
+> 
+> and what about nvidia* and fglrx, should they do the same ?
+
+Well, currently we always include the KMS drivers in initrd, and when
+nvidia* or fglrx is enabled we simply add nokmsboot (mga/mdv specific)
+kernel parameter to avoid initrd rebuild.
+
+> and for a dkms related issue, I've also been thinking we whould
+> trigger dkms rebuild on kernel install to save time on next bootup.
+
+That would seem reasonable, it would just be a matter of
+[ -x /usr/sbin/dkms_autoinstaller ] && \
+	/usr/sbin/dkms_autoinstaller start %kernelver || :
+in kernel %post AFAICS...
+
+-- 
+Anssi Hannula
+