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

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

Robin H. Johnson posted on Sun, 11 Mar 2012 21:08:47 +0000 as excerpted:

> The quickest initramfs, assuming that ALL kernel modules you need to
> boot are already compiled into your kernel:
> genkernel --install --no-ramdisk-modules initramfs
> 
> Plus optionally, If you know you don't need any of these, include this
> to make it really get much smaller:
> --no-lvm --no-mdadm --no-dmraid --no-multipath --no-iscsi --no-disklabel
> --no-firmware --no-zfs --no-gpg --no-luks
> 
> --disklabel is the one that most users will probably need, if they use
> LABEL= or UUID= arguments in your fstab.
> 
> That will give you an initramfs of scripts + busybox.
> On my box, it's about 724KiB.

Thanks.  You just added concrete to what had to date been a rather hand-
wavy discussion, and it's quite useful. =:^)

Meanwhile, also note that there's PARTLABEL, PARTUUID and ID, that the 
mount manpage promises to honor.  I've not used these myself, but there 
was a thread on the btrfs list discussing GPT format and users of its 
partition-labels (as opposed to filesystem labels), that pointed out that 
mount honors these, since it internally uses the udev symlinks mechanism 
to support (fs) labels, etc, so they get support for gpt-partition-
labels, etc, essentially "for free".

That has implications both here and for openrc, the latter of which I 
appreciate well, as I run openrc-9999 now, having found it FAR easier to 
isolate and report problems with new versions on my apparently rather 
unusual system config (including fstab fs-label but not partlabel or uuid 
usage) directly from git, than from the MUCH too vague released-version 
changelogs.

-- 
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