[arch-general] Removing initrd (For use with GRUB2, LVM, GPT)

[C Anthony Risinger]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 10:01 PM, Jonathan Vasquez
<jvasquez1011 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Btw, for the first picture, it says that /usr is not mounted. I
> believe that is because my /usr in in /dev/mapper/arch-usr and that
> doesn't get mounted until later in the boot process.
>
On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 10:03 PM, Jonathan Vasquez
<jvasquez1011 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Is there any way to choose when to load specific stuff? In gentoo you
> could do this by selecting a runlevel by name (sysinit, boot, default,
> shutdown). I don't know if this is possible in Arch.

imo, you're headed down a path that will just lead to frustration, and
is reliant on legacy models/codepaths.  *why* do you want to avoid
initramfs?  it's use enables the kernel to accommodate even the most
esoteric setups ... no gain in dropping it, unless you are using it
for embedded devices, and even then it's useful.

the initramfs does some initialization of the environment, and the
various scripts that generate it try to include all sorts of stuff.
you may be seeing a black screen because the kernel verbosity is too
low or never set, or maybe you pulled a KMS driver into the initramfs
in the past ... difficult to know ... maybe udev was probing something
you forgot about.  the kernel wants to be as dumb as possible about
the ridiculous stuff userspace wants to do, and i fully expect the
kernel to be dumbed down even further ... i personally don't think the
user should have an [official] choice to drop initramfs; IIRC, some
modules can't even be built into the kernel because they are mutually
exclusive with other variants (symbol clashes), and userspace must
decide which should be included.

what is the motivation exactly?  my grub2 GPT partition is ~128MiB,
kinda big, but that still only represents 1/600th of my small, 60GiB
disk.  what is the benefit you seek?  recompiling the kernel to switch
from an ext4 to btrfs root sounds pretty annoying to me ;-)

-- 

C Anthony