[gentoo-dev] Re: newsitem: unmasking udev-181

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 9:27 PM, William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> here is the udev 181 unmasking news item.
>
> If all goes well, this will be committed to the tree  on 3/14 UTC.

I guess this might be OK for unstable, but before this goes stable we
really need to improve the docs around this.  As far as I can tell
neither the genkernel nor dracut docs have specific instructions about
how to handle mounting /usr.  Since having a separate /usr is often
the result of having a more complex configuration (nfs, lvm, mdraid,
etc), instructions explaining how things work and how to handle
variations is pretty important.  Perhaps genkernel automagically does
the right thing in some cases, but I know that dracut does not unless
you properly configure it.  I doubt either tool will handle more
complex situations without some scripting.

I'm not really asking for automation here - just documentation and
reasonable stability in how things work.

Again, this is likely more of a concern before this is stabilized.
However, knowing what I went through to get my bind-mounted /usr on
LVM+mdraid working with dracut, I can imagine that any unstable users
with tricky setups could face a fun weekend.

Perhaps a suggestion for the news item.  I'd recommend that anybody
who needs an initramfs to mount /usr get that working BEFORE they
upgrade udev.  This situation is a heck of a lot easier to figure out
if the system still can be booted when the initramfs doesn't work.

Rich