Re: [gentoo-dev] news item for udev 197-r3 upgrade (yes, I know, it's late)

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 1:56 PM, Mike Gilbert <floppym@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> Ah, good to know. I'm used to dealing with my little homegrown
> initramfs, where I parse root from the kernel command line in /init.
> genkernel does the same thing.

Yeah, dracut generally "does the right thing" but that generally
assumes that things like fstab are correct.  It still uses the root=
option (I'm not sure if it can work without it - I believe it does
snapshot the fstab at time of creation).  My understanding is that
dracut actually remounts root a few times as it moves along, starting
with the kernel command line, then after setting up mounts in
fstab.sys (which is how you handle a separate /usr), and finally based
on the contents of fstab (which it can't read until it actually has
root mounted).  When it is done the root filesystem is mounted using
all options in /etc/fstab, which is probably a good thing.

That said, it hasn't been without bugs.  I think they're mostly fixed
at this point, but I haven't tried removing all of my workarounds
(mainly around the fact that it wasn't auto-assembling my raid unless
I hardcoded an mdadm -As in a script).

The best thing about dracut though is that it is pretty powerful, with
modules/hooks/etc.  When it wasn't quite working right for me I just
added my own module to it.  It also has the side-benefit of working
well even when mdadm decides to renumber all my md minor device
numbers (tends to happen when booting for CD or whatever - probably
because I'm using older metadata for some of the arrays).

Rich