[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] Mkinitcpio replacement with Dracut

Giancarlo Razzolini grazzolini at archlinux.org
Tue May 21 18:28:01 UTC 2019


Em maio 21, 2019 15:15 Andy Pieters escreveu:
> What's the rationale for going dracut? I'm quite happy with mkinitcpio
> 

I think I've addressed this in the first email. I'm also quite happy with mkinitcpio,
and I myself maintain several mkinitcpio hooks that would need to be re-written for dracut.

But, from the mkinitcpio development perspective, it lacks several things that would be necessary
to develop it further. We don't have a testing suite, which makes the development process quite
tiresome and error prone. Our network booting code is not working for even the simplest cases.
We have two ways to boot the system today, and depending on the hooks combinations we have issues.

Dracut by default uses systemd and I think that will be the supported way to boot Arch. Even though
dracut can use a non systemd initramfs, we should make things more uniform. Whomever wants to hack
dracut, will have much more ways to do so than we have with mkinitcpio currently.

I know, change is not always good for everyone, but I think that in the long term Arch will only
benefit from this change. Also, I believe that people interested in using mkinitcpio, will be more
than able to help maintain it, when we eventually (if) remove it from our repositories.

Heck, I might maintain it myself on the side, since I have a lot of stuff going on for it. But, I
believe that for Arch official initramfs system, we should replace it. There are other options too,
I have considered dracut because it currently fills in a gap we have on the development process, while
also fixing all the corner cases mkinitcpio doesn't support well today.

Regards,
Giancarlo Razzolini
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 870 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/attachments/20190521/c47c41a0/attachment.sig>


More information about the arch-general mailing list