On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 8:37 PM, M. J. Everitt <m.j.ever...@iee.org> wrote: > I may have contributed to the latter point, but addressing the former > specifically, I, like others, have /usr mounted on an NFS server for > thin clients (not in the full-true sense, but with a very minimal / > currently residing on USB). > What you propose moving binaries from / to /usr would render them > completely unbootable without early mounting via initramfs.
I believe dracut will auto-mount /usr. As long as your fstab is accurate (double-check - sometimes people don't have correct settings for root since without something like dracut the root filesystem isn't mounted according to fstab), I suspect it will just NFS-mount your /usr before pivoting. If not you can probably use the fstab-user module to force it to mount (you stick a second dracut-specific fstab file in /etc and it will mount everything it finds in there whether it thinks it needs it or not). I'd start with the auto-magic detection since it tends to work. Dracut needs a root= setting on the kernel command line to get it started, but once it finds that it tends to figure out how to get it mounted read-only, then it looks inside for an /etc/fstab to figure out the rest. When you build the initramfs dracut will also copy files like mdadm.conf into the initramfs automatically. You can also configure it to load extra stuff in there (my initramfs doubles as a rescue image, so I stick a few convenience things in there that strictly aren't needed, like btrfstune and a full bash instead of just dash). Part of me also wonders if Gentoo would be better off having emerge gentoo-sources actually BUILD the kernel and initramfs and not just dump a bunch of sources on the disk. Most distros consider an initramfs a no-brainer because it just ships already setup, and an initramfs is a lot more forgiving when you add a new drive and your firmware/kernel decides to re-number everything. Just label your filesystems or store UUIDs and the initramfs will figure out what happened. -- Rich
