Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Can initrd and/or RAID be disabled at boot?

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 11:53 AM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
> Mark Knecht posted on Tue, 25 Jun 2013 15:51:14 -0700 as excerpted:
>
>>    This is related to my thread from a few days ago about the
>> disappointing speed of my RAID6 root partition. The goal here is to get
>> the machine booting from an SSD so that I can free up my five hard
>> drives to play with.
>
> FWIW, this post covers a lot of ground, too much I think to really cover
> in one post.  Which is why I've delayed replying until now.  I expect
> I'll punt on some topics this first time thru, but we'll see how it
> goes...

Agreed, and I've made some major course changes WRT this whole thing,
but there's a lot of great info in your response so I'm going to make
a very targeted response for now.

<SNIP>
>
> zgrep 'REISER\|EXT4\|TMPFS\|BTRFS' /proc/config.gz
<SNIP>

I use ext4 mostly. Some ext3 on older external USB drives. ext2 on boot.

Looking at caps, xattr & filecaps I don't appear to have them selected
on any packages. (equery hasuse ..., emerge -pv ...)

Similar results as yours for the zgrep:

mark@c2RAID6 ~ $ zgrep 'REISER\|EXT4\|TMPFS\|BTRFS' /proc/config.gz
CONFIG_DEVTMPFS=y
# CONFIG_DEVTMPFS_MOUNT is not set
CONFIG_EXT4_FS=y
CONFIG_EXT4_FS_POSIX_ACL=y
CONFIG_EXT4_FS_SECURITY=y
# CONFIG_EXT4_DEBUG is not set
# CONFIG_REISERFS_FS is not set
# CONFIG_BTRFS_FS is not set
CONFIG_TMPFS=y
CONFIG_TMPFS_POSIX_ACL=y
CONFIG_TMPFS_XATTR=y
mark@c2RAID6 ~ $

With that in mind I may well have needed the -X on the rsync. However
as I didn't get a quick response I decided this was a background issue
for me in a sense. My HDD-based, low performance RAID6 is working so
for now I'm cool. As I have some time coming up over the weekend, and
because I have this SSD which is to date unused, I decided to simply
build a new Gentoo install from scratch on the SDD in a chroot. I
haven't even bothered with trying to boot it yet. I just copied all
the RAID6 config stuff, world file, /etc/portage/*, /etc/conf.d, blah
blah and let it start building all the binaries. If it works, great.
If not no big deal. It's just compute cycles because it's on the SDD
and isn't slowing me down much inside of the RAID6 environment today.

However, I think your comments about gpt & grub2 are VERY good points
and might work out in my favor long term. I only used 2 partitions on
the SDD - one for a new boot partition and one for /, my thought being
that if I installed grub on the SDD then in BIOS I could point at
/dev/sda to boot off the SDD instead of /dev/sdb. As I think about
your comments, I could consider backing up the SDD install using rsync
-aAvx, converting to gpt & grub2 on that device, do my learning and it
doesn't have to impact my current setup at all. That can all stay on
the hard drives until I'm ready to get rid of it. It's just a flip of
a switch in BIOS as to which one I'm using.

I'll go through your response later and continue the conversation as
appropriate but I wanted to say thanks more quickly for the above
points.

Cheers,
Mark