On Wed, 7 Sep 2011 23:33:35 -0400, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote about Re: [gentoo-user] /dev/sda* missing at boot:
> On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 9:37 PM, David W Noon <dwn...@ntlworld.com> > wrote: [snip] > > The more I think about this merge of / and /usr, the dumber I think > > the idea is. As I wrote in an earlier message on this list, the > > initramfs will be many times larger than the kernel itself. > > Indeed, my /boot partition is only 32 MiB, and that will be too > > small to contain all the extra libraries and programs to run the > > initramfs script. > > I don't see any problem with an initramfs larger than the kernel. It > will handle a lot of stuff. But if you don't want to change your /boot > partition, then don't upgrade to new kernels. It is not the kernel that is the problem. It is udev. I expect to switch my simpler systems away from udev to mdev. This loses some functionality of udev, but that isn't needed on the simpler hardware configurations. So mdev could be the simplest solution to the design flaws creeping into udev. A very real problem with a large initramfs/initrd is maintaining the software embedded in the image file. If it contains duplicates of e2fsck, reiserfsck, glibc, libpthread, etc., then these typically need to be upgraded whenever the primary copy is upgraded. The bigger the initramfs becomes, the bigger the maintenance headache it inflicts. > Change happens. I think a more appropriate observation is: change is inevitable, but progress isn't. > >> > Mounting it read-only > >> > seems the only sensible one, and then I think is better to go all > >> > the way and mount / read-only. > >> > >> Putting /etc on a read-only filesystem seems a really bad idea. > > > > To say the least. > > It works, Putting /etc on a read-only mount works?? I take it you don't run any database servers. Every time I add a new database to PostgreSQL it requires (for my needs) at least 1 new tablespace be created with its own mount point. This requires me to add at least 1 line to /etc/fstab so that the new tablespace(s) is/are mounted before PostgreSQL starts after a re-boot. This becomes impossible if /etc is read-only. Similarly, /etc/mtab needs to remain writeable, as symlinking it to /proc/mounts (or /proc/self/mounts) won't always work for programs that parse /etc/mtab. This is because /proc/mounts contains additional mount options that are fairly Linux-specific, whereas /etc/mtab should be vanilla UNIX. > and it makes life easier for upstream. Which are the ones > writting the code. It allows people developing udev scripts to use programs and libraries that are not [currently] on rootfs inside their scripts. If I don't use those scripts, I don't care. -- Regards, Dave [RLU #314465] *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* dwn...@ntlworld.com (David W Noon) *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
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