[Yaird-devel] Re: initramfs generator selection

Maximilian Attems maks at sternwelten.at
Thu Dec 29 15:18:04 UTC 2005


On Thu, Dec 29, 2005 at 04:01:15PM +0100, Frans Pop wrote:
> (CC to d-kernel and yaird-devel for comments. Topic is a question in
>  Debian Installer regarding the initramfs generator to use.
>  For the start of the thread see:
>  http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/12/msg01228.html)
>  
> On Thursday 29 December 2005 09:07, Christian Perrier wrote:
> > > by which tool, we can either set single defaults or drop the priority
> > > to medium.
> >
> > s/can/must..:-)
> >
> > Given that the question is really technical, I would even suggest to
> > drop the priority down to low.....

agreeing.
 
> Hmm. I think it is on the same level as offering static network 
> configuration over DHCP or, maybe better, (not) loading some modules 
> during hardware detection.
> 
> The main advantage of the patch as I see it is its flexibility: it allows 
> both us and derivatives to set things up as they like with only minor 
> changes:
> - per arch defaults
> - option of offering alternative generators
> - option to ask the user which generator to use
> - option to preseed
> It also makes the installer independent of the default dependency set in 
> kernel-image packages.
> 
> We could even add a template to set the priority of the question per 
> architecture if there is a real need for that...
> 
> I agree the question should be avoided if possible, certainly for default 
> installs. Whether to ask the question during medium priority installs is 
> debatable, but, as long as both tools have issues, IMO a good thing.
> 
> My main reason for setting it high initially was the brokenness of 
> initramfs-tools (or udev or whatever) wrt. the loading ide-disk in some 
> cases. As that will be fixed in a new upload of initramfs-tools today, I 
> see no problem with changing the priority to medium.

fs uploaded it.
thanks a lot for your testing.
 
> Next thing to decide is which of the two generators should be default. My 
> personal preference goes to initramfs-tools. Main reason is that yaird's 
> "minimalistic" and "fail when in doubt" approach is more likely to result 
> in (possibly unneeded) installation failures than initramfs-tools. The 
> second reason is the missing support in yaird for drivers that do not yet 
> have sysfs support.
> I feel that yaird's approach is more suited to upgrades than to new 
> installs. A failure to reboot is probably less problematic for a newly 
> installed system than for a production system (therefore having yaird as 
> the default dependency in the kernel-image packages might be a good 
> choice).

cool.
the choice in k-p is decided to be rotated.
2.6.14 is yaird
2.6.15 is initramfs-tools

so no final decision there.
 
> - Question asked at medium priority
> - Default generator settings (based on [1] and klibc availability):

jbailey is working on removing the klibc dependency.
that should clear a lot of archs for us.
busybox is currently missing fstype, run-init and ntfsmount
(klibc-utils).

>   Default: initramfs-tools yaird
>   Default[alpha]: initramfs-tools
>   Default[hppa]: yaird
>   Default[ia64]: yaird
>   Default[m68k]: yaird
>   Default[mips]: yaird
>   Default[mipsel]: yaird
>   Default[sparc]: yaird
> 
> [1] http://wiki.debian.org/InitrdReplacementOptions

yaird has an heavy perl + modules dependency,
initramfs-tools will take much less space.

regards

-- 
maks




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