Re: [gentoo-project] Council meeting: Tuesday 3 April 2012, 19:00 UTC

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 5:15 PM, Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org> wrote:
> - dracut: I failed to find any documentation in our handbooks.
>  Anyway, dracut looks like overkill for my simple usage case.
>

I dunno - dracut aims to be the ultimate generic automagic
plugin-supporting option, so I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.  Its
biggest issue is that its features have overtaken the documentation,
and it is still pretty raw.

> So finally I ended up building my own initramfs, using information
> from the wiki and from forums.

I think you would have been better off with dracut, but as I've
blogged it isn't without its issues.  I might give genkernel a shot
again now that it sounds like it has better handling of
md/lvm/bind/etc.  If it can figure out my setup then I'll be
impressed.

My biggest issue with dracut is that for whatever reason it doesn't
detect and assemble my raid.  I ended up hacking together a module to
force it to run:
        mdadm -As
        lvm pvscan
        lvm vgscan
        lvm lvscan
        lvm vgchange -ay

I just can't get how if that works how the automagic functionality in
the script can't work.  The part that fails is mdadm bit, and it works
fine on full-auto mode (though it does have my mdadm.conf to look at).
 Even the kernel auto-assembles the raid fine, though that code is
disabled if you use an initramfs.

>
> IMHO this has to be done before >=udev-180 can be stabilised.
>

I agree completely.  The current documentation is too weak for stabilization.

Rich