[gentoo-amd64] Re: Please get me straight about sysvinit vs. systemd, udev vs eudev vs mdev, virtuals and other things...

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Duncan posted on Mon, 03 Mar 2014 19:43:26 +0000 as excerpted:

> I'm only running an initramfs at all because some kernels ago when I
> originally setup my (dual-device raid1 mode) btrfs rootfs, the kernel
> command-line parser couldn't properly parse rootflags=device= ,
> apparently due to splitting at the wrong equal-sign, so the only way I
> could mount rootfs direct from the kernel commandline was in degraded
> mode. =:^(  I'm not sure if that has been fixed or not, but I have the
> initramfs setup and working now, so it's not so pressing to find out.
> Anyway, I expect that someday I'll be able to omit that and go back to a
> direct (initr*less) kernel commandline root=/rootflags= boot.

FWIW, I tested a couple days ago with a current 3.14-rcX+ git kernel, and 
the kernel commandline parsing issue appears to still be there, so no 
simple way out of the initr* situation for me yet. =:^(

Maybe one of these days I'll go looking into it more intensely, and 
report a kernel bug if necessary.  I wonder if there's some other command 
I can double-equal check to see if it parses in the right place, and I've 
not even googled it yet, but that does seem the most likely problem, 
given that a NON-equals-including rootflags (btrfs' degraded option) was 
demonstrated to still work in my earlier testing, so the rootflags option 
is in general working, and btrfs is actually picking up general options 
passed to it that way.

'Cause it'd sure be nice to be able to just dump this initr* business 
again!

(Hmm, just musing, but as a definite non-coder but an otherwise 
reasonably advanced gentooer who never-the-less has kernel bug-reporting 
experience, and who routinely applies patches to other things and 
occasionally to the kernel as well, and who in very limited circumstances 
can actually come up with his own patches...  I obviously can't get too 
ambitious about creating my own kernel patches, but I wonder just how 
difficult it might be to patch the kernel btrfs code to use some other 
delimiter in place of the equals in "device="...  If I could successfully 
do that just for testing, hopefully conclusively proving my suspicion 
that the double-equals IS the problem, that would certainly make an 
actually practical bug report, while just a suspicion... not so much, 
particularly since I don't have a kernel version where it was known to 
work in the past, thereby making it a known regression, tho various hints 
I've seen in comments found on the net suggest that it must have at some 
point, altho there's also hints that it was some time ago, given the age 
of some of the comments saying it now doesn't work.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman