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.
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 ;-)
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). -- C Anthony