On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 3:04 AM, Stefan G. Weichinger <li...@xunil.at> wrote: > Am 17.05.2014 20:48, schrieb Greg Turner: >> But if you have it working now without any initramfs then >> obviously that is full of win (the LA kind, not the Redmond variety)! > > I wonder if there are any real advantages of booting *with* the > initramfs even when you don't need it. > ... > ... it seems to me that this adds something like an additional layer > around certain things and helps to make all that more bulletproof? >
Now that I know how to use dracut I'm basically using it everywhere, even for VMs that have a single ext4 partition (where it really is a bit overkill). For the most part it is plug-and-play, and once you start getting multiple disks involved it adds a lot of robustness. Dracut can fsck your disks if you want, it can reliably mount the right root even with fairly confusing layouts, and it actually respects whatever is in /etc/fstab. It can also be told to mount anything you want before pivoting via an additional fstab (with the usual syntax). Sure, in theory it is one more thing that can go wrong, but I look at it more like one thing that can help get things to go right when they would otherwise go wrong. I'd encourage anybody who hasn't used it to at least get an understanding of it. It can make your life easier. There was a Lennart article about using the initramfs to do shutdown which was good reading. The concept is that you can cleanly unmount everything this way, and it also handles FUSE much better. Rich
