[Yaird-devel] Re: initramfs generator selection

Frans Pop aragorn at tiscali.nl
Thu Dec 29 15:01:15 UTC 2005


(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.....

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.

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).

Cheers,
FJP

Here are the settings I propose to upload the new version of 
base-installer with:
- Question asked at medium priority
- Default generator settings (based on [1] and klibc availability):
  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
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