Dracut questions

Dracut questions

[Warren Togami]

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Initrdrewrite
> 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
wtogami-H+wXaHxf7aLQT0dZR+AlfA@public.gmane.org
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Re: Dracut questions

[Philippe Seewer]

Warren Togami wrote:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Initrdrewrite
>> 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).

> 
> 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...

> 
> 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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Re: Dracut questions

[Jeremy Katz]

On Dec 19, 2008, at 12:16 AM, Warren Togami wrote:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Initrdrewrite
>> 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.

> 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.

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