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

Wed Dec 14 01:47:00 CET 2011

On 03.12.2011 16:39, Anssi Hannula wrote:
+> 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?
+
+Does anyone know?
+
+>>> 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.
+
+One possibility is to make dracut record the missing firmware files
+somewhere, and then in %post or in filetrigger (for /lib/firmware) check
+if missing firmware got installed, and in that case run
+bootloader-config --action rebuild-initrds.
+
+>> 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
+