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

[Tom Gundersen]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 5:01 AM, 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.

You should still get boot messages during boot even without an
initramfs, anything else is a bug in initscripts. Initscripts does not
strictly speaking depend on an initrams, but if it is there it will
take advantage of the benefits.

However, mounting without /usr is not supported, so as long as you do
that weird things will happen and any bug reports will be closed as
"wont fix".

Luckily, it will soon be possible to mount /usr before starting init,
so your lvm setup should be supported. However, this is done in the
initramfs (the only sane place to do it).

Using an initramfs is essentially required unless you have a very
simple setup (/usr on the rootfs and no lvm/md/crypt involved). Even
if you have a simple setup it will give you nice benefits like the
ability to fsck the rootfs before mounting it, and unmounting it
properly before shutting down.

Cheers,

Tom