[arch-dev-public] New kernel packages and mkinitcpio hooks

[Giancarlo Razzolini]

Hi All,

As most of you have noticed already, the kernel packages had some recent changes
where they do not install the kernel to /boot, as well as they do not have any kmod [0]
nor mkinitcpio hooks anymore. Neither they do install mkinitcpio presets [1].

These changes were made after a lot of discussions between myself, Jen and the maintainers
of the other kernels as well. We have spent a lot of time to arrive at this current format. [2]

Kernels and presets are not installed and generated by mkinitcpio alpm hooks and scripts.
All kernels that have a pkgbase entry file [3] will be processed by these scripts. We have
changed all our officials kernels.

Also, kernel removals are handled by mkinitcpio as well. We want to make the boot process more
flexible, while also keeping it backwards compatible by default. There are a few changes I have
planned for the next mkinitcpio release [4] that will help even further to achieve this.

I have been working on hooks for dracut to install the kernels to /boot, as mkinitcpio does, and
also create a simple configuration file for each kernel. Right now dracut does not conflict with
mkinitcpio, and it is possible to have both installed at the same time on a system. The hooks I'm
writing for dracut will, however, check if mkinitcpio is installed and won't run if it is. We might
eventually conflict them if we decide dracut is mature enough for usage with Arch Linux. As a side
note, I have been using it for the past 8 months without any issues.

Regards,
Giancarlo Razzolini

[0] https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/commit/trunk?h=packages/kmod&id=9e2016961cc34830957ceee0593a80bfa9e05ba9
[1] https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/commit/trunk?h=packages/linux&id=43c5745a17e2ebe413a7140d4ef9326e26d6cb20
[2] https://github.com/archlinux/mkinitcpio/pull/7
[3] https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/commit/trunk?h=packages/linux&id=f1c97a49a09b0fd8d7d1c3f6e8e635ef45974373
[4] https://github.com/archlinux/mkinitcpio/issues
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