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

[Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com>]

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On Friday 09 Sep 2011 12:35:47 Alex Schuster wrote:
> 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.

It's not a catastrophically big deal, but it is an imposed workaround that 
goes against the freedom of choice that we gentoo-ers have enjoyed hitherto.

It also seems counter-intuitive that udev devs' convenience should take 
primacy over the FHS convention and the prevailing minimal booting process.

It will only affect one out of three boxen of mine and I could surely fix 
that, but I am against restricting unquestioningly what I can do with gentoo, 
just because a udev coder didn't think it through enough to come up with a 
smarter solution; and then the Gentoo devs did not put up a fight in 
representing their user base.

It's a point of principle and on this basis I'd like to object to it, not for 
a poxy little box which I can reconfigure one day if I must.
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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