On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 1:07 AM, Jonathan Vasquez <jvasquez1011@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 12:36 AM, C Anthony Risinger <anthony@xtfx.me> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 10:29 PM, Jonathan Vasquez <jvasquez1011@gmail.com> wrote:
Simplicity and minimalism would be what motivates me the most. If I don't need an initramfs to get my system boot up, why have one? I know the benefits that initramfs provides, but I don't need any of them. All I need my computer to do is start, find the kernel, boot my comp to the terminal or X11 (depending on my setup).
well, i hear ya, but i'd argue you already *have* the minimalist setup ... life is about balance friend :-) i'm not sure too many would agree (my time is more important that pedantic minimalism) hence support may be hard to come by. although, this paragraph is backed by little more than imaginary statistics and [possibly misguided] intuition.
Well I'm not trying to be minimalistic just to be minimalistic. I'm picky about how my things are organized on my system, and the files I have installed. If I have the power to remove something unnecessary, then I most likely will remove it ;). I do agree with you that life is about balance. I might go back to using an initramfs, but not atm, probably when I learn how to make my own basic initramfs haha with busybox and my own /init script (For learning purposes primarily).
My set up atm that lets me have GPT, GRUB2, LVM, all without needing initramfs, and future proofs me the need to move the physical partitions in the drive (not the logical ones inside the lvm) is:
/dev/sda1 BIOS Boot Partition 32M /dev/sda2 /boot ext2 100M /dev/sda3 / ext4 2G /dev/sda4 Linux LVM (name: arch)
... because you desire to drop the initramfs, you've lost the ability to manage / with LVM2, and that sux. 2GiB *might* be enough, never was nearly enough for me (though, i reject the idea of oodles of partitions) ... but what if it's not? by generating a teeny 4Mib file, you're / moves to LVM2, and you never have to rebuild the kern if you change FS, change hardware, change <insert here> ... dunno, nice trade off to me ... won't say anything further about it ;-)
Yea.. I know it sucks.. previously my set up was just as you said, I still have that setup in my old Arch drive (That I haven't formatted). I'm assuming you already know how my old setup was since you mentioned me losing the ability to manage / under LVM2. 2GB is more than needed, 1GB would be more minimal, but you just have to make sure you use the other partitions inside of the LVM, since /usr, /var , etc take up a lot of space for applications and packages. I agree, for a small initramfs I gain a lot. I wanted to see if this was possible under Arch, under my setup, clearly it is, but it has a cost :(.
As for rebuilding the kernel, I built support for ext2/3/4 directly into the kernel. So if I need to switch to btrfs, I can recompile yes, but it only takes me like 5-7 minutes to rebuild since my kernel is just for my computer. I could also rebuild it months in advance with btrfs support as well and not have to worry about it later on :). Changing hardware, I hardly do this anymore, so doesn't really affect me, if this happens, then I would gladly explore the kernel configuration again and learn about my new system :).
Created in a (read most, write last order .. if it matters inside LVM) /dev/arch/swap 2G /dev/arch/usr 10G /dev/arch/tmp 10G /dev/arch/opt 5G /dev/arch/var 10G /dev/arch/home 500G
btw, if swap is on LVM2, you'll want to flag it contiguous (-Cy on `lvcreate`) if you didn't already. also, not sure if you need it, but hibernation will be impossible without initramfs if swap is on LVM2. lastly, be aware that a separate `/usr` is rapidly degrading into a next-to-unsupported/awkwardly-handled configuration ... while a lack of initramfs avoids the need to mount it pre-root, you may still have issues during early boot ... especially since soon, if not now, Arch initscripts will fully expect `/usr` to be available before pid 1 (Tom or someone else would need to confirm this).
Yup, my swap was made contiguous. I don't hibernate and took that into account when making my partition layouts. I just suspend to ram which can be done still in my layout. That would be an unfortunate event if I am required to have to do some of those things.
--
C Anthony
Overall, as I said in the beginning, I may end up going back to using an initramfs to simplify the partition layouts in general. Using an initramfs, pretty much, has nothing but advantages.
Although hacking to see if something is possible surely is fun, .. if only for a while. -- Jonathan Vasquez
I was reading this and it reminded me of what you said Anthony: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove -- Jonathan Vasquez