Re: [gentoo-user] /dev/sda* missing at boot

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

Dale writes:

Wow, what a big thread. While I also do not really like udev
requiring /usr at boot time, I also understand that there are some
arguments pro doing so.
But then, I wonder what the big deal is. If an initramfs is now required
for people using a separate /usr, then let's all use an initramfs, if we
can't change how udev is going. It's annoying, we may feel it is wrong,
but to me it seems that for most of us it is not a really big problem.
What I fear much more is when good old grub is no longer supported and I
have to use grub2, which I tried to understand, but failed.

> My choices are:
> 
> 1: move from Gentoo to something else.  I'm seriously considering this 
> one.  If I can learn Gentoo, I can learn any distro!  LFS may be 
> excluded tho.

So, because you want to avoid to change your Gentoo installation to use
an initramfs, you switch to another distribution, which most likely uses
an initramfs anayway?

> 2: Stick with Gentoo and hope this is corrected like hal was dealt with.
> 2b:  Go with LVM for everything and have a init* to boot.

LVM is great and I suggest everyone using it, but it's not necessary here.

> 2c:  Move /usr and use init* with no LVM.

If you can extend you root partition, yes, just copy /usr there, and all
will be fine.

> 2d:  Just redo my whole system with a larger / partition.

Which would be a lot of work.

Personally I do not care much about this, as I already am using an
initramfs :) That's because all my partitions are encrypted LVM volumes.
Except for /boot, which is on on USB stick.

When I switched to using an initramfs, it was not very complicated. I
simply use genkernel. With CLEAN="no" and MRPROPER="no", it uses my 
/usr/src/linux/.config and does not change the kernel options. Then comes genkernel --install --lvm -luks all, and I have kernel and initramfs
in /boot. I manually add them to my grub.conf. emerge @module-rebuild,
and I'm done. I guess for most of us this would work. I don't know what
Michael has to do in order to keep nvidia-drivers instead of nouveau, but
I assume some howto or new item will come up to solve this. Whenever
Gentoo had us to do major changes, there was a good explanation of what
to do, and it worked fine. Migration to openrc was more complicated I
think. And hey, I was satisfied with the way it's been before.

> I liked my original plan better.
> 
> 1:  Go to boot runlevel.
> 2:  Mount what will be new /usr partition to some mount point.
> 3:  Copy /usr to the new partition
> 4:  rm the old /usr data.
> 5:  Mount the new /usr partition and add it to fstab
> 6:  Switch back to default runlevel and life goes on.

I don't get this one. Why do you want to copy an existing /usr partition
to another one?

> Can I slap whoever started this?  The more I think on this, the worse
> it sounds.  I can't even imagine someone who runs some large server.
> Any hair left?  lol

Yes, I also feel sorry for guys like Alan. But for us desktop users
I think's it's not such a big deal.

	Wonko