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Dracut questions

DISCUSSION Warren Togami 3 participants 3 messages Dec 19, 2008 1 message not in the archive

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#0 lore raw

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Initrdrewrite

Quoted 3 lines

Probe at runtime instead of buildtime - Include all drivers, not just the drivers necessary for the hardware being run. (For storage, the common ones will be built-in to the kernel anyway)

This means include all storage drivers and firmware for the storage drivers?

Does this also mean we only add network drivers if the initrd is explicitly built for netboot?

How do we plan on dealing with the location of various standard utilities being different on other Linux distributions?

Fedora Debian
/sbin/lspci /usr/bin/lspci
/sbin/lsmod /bin/lsmod
(just off the top of my head)

Perhaps use "which" to find it? But then how do we choose its destination path in the initrd chroot if the distributions disagree on where they expect a command to go? Will they disagree?

Warren Togami
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#2 lore raw
Quoted 6 lines · Warren Togami

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Initrdrewrite

Quoted 3 lines

Probe at runtime instead of buildtime - Include all drivers, not just the drivers necessary for the hardware being run. (For storage, the common ones will be built-in to the kernel anyway)

This means include all storage drivers and firmware for the storage drivers?

From the description I'd guess so. Although I'd like to see both options. A full one with all drivers for generic boots and another one tailored for specific systems and fast booting (and maybe small memory footprint).

Quoted 2 lines

Does this also mean we only add network drivers if the initrd is explicitly built for netboot?

Makes sense, otherwise the image gets huge! My current 2.6.27 netboot initrd reaches almost 8Megs...

Quoted 9 lines

How do we plan on dealing with the location of various standard utilities being different on other Linux distributions?

Fedora Debian
/sbin/lspci /usr/bin/lspci
/sbin/lsmod /bin/lsmod
(just off the top of my head)

Perhaps use "which" to find it? But then how do we choose its destination path in the initrd chroot if the distributions disagree on where they expect a command to go? Will they disagree?

Maybe the LSB might help a bit. It doesn't say anything about where the utilities actually have to go, but read this:
[quote]
16.4. Path For System Administration Utilities

Certain utilities used for system administration (and other privileged commands) may be stored in /sbin, /usr/sbin, and /usr/local/sbin. Applications requiring to use commands identified as system administration utilities should add these directories to their PATH. By default, as described in ISO POSIX (2003), standard utilities shall be found on the PATH returned by getconf PATH (or command -p getconf PATH to be guaranteed to invoke the correct version of getconf). [/quote]

Cheers,
Philippe
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#3 lore raw
In reply to a message not in the archive
Quoted 6 lines · Warren Togami

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Initrdrewrite

Quoted 3 lines

Probe at runtime instead of buildtime - Include all drivers, not just the drivers necessary for the hardware being run. (For storage, the common ones will be built-in to the kernel anyway)

This means include all storage drivers and firmware for the storage drivers?

By default, yes. As of yesterday or so, there's support for overriding the set of modules if you want a subset since I figure someone someday will want it and it's trivial to allow.

Quoted 1 line

Does this also mean we only add network drivers if the initrd is explicitly built for netboot?

There are many open questions for exactly how best to handle netboot. I expect the answer is "yes" and that we end up wanting to have the config for the initramfs to specify things like

     nbd_boot="yes"
     nfs_boot="yes"
     iscsi_boot="yes"

etc so that people can tweak accordingly. It may also be that we want it to be based on the presence of things installed on the system.

Quoted 1 line

How do we plan on dealing with the location of various standard utilities being different on other Linux distributions?

[snip]

Quoted 2 lines

Perhaps use "which" to find it? But then how do we choose its destination path in the initrd chroot if the distributions disagree on where they expect a command to go? Will they disagree?

which will work just fine (although your examples are ones that don't matter right now :). And the destination path should match the source path. We just have to ensure $PATH is appropriate in the initramfs

Jeremy
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