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

Jonathan Vasquez jvasquez1011 at gmail.com
Wed Jan 11 23:29:33 EST 2012


On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 11:19 PM, C Anthony Risinger <anthony at xtfx.me> wrote:
> 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

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).

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)

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

400G Free in LVM Pool

-- 
Jonathan Vasquez


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