[arch-projects] [mkinitcpio][RFC] a better fallback image?

Tom Gundersen teg at jklm.no
Wed Jul 25 17:21:10 EDT 2012


Dave, Tobias, Thomas,

I just managed to hose one of my machines. It was mainly due to an
unfortunate series of events, but I have a suggestion which would have
avoided this situation and might beneficial in general.

The way things are now, I think the fallback image mkinitcpio
generates by default is not very useful. In my experience the fallback
image is broken exactly when the regular image is broken. I expect the
reason for this is that the autodetection of modules is very good
these days, so _that_ is never the problem.

When there is a problem, which happens every once in a while, it is
either due to user error (i.e. configuration errors), or mkinitcpio
not being ran at all (and hence having the modules of the previous
kernel (which is what happened to me today).

It seems to me that a more useful fallback image, would be one that is
generated at compile-time, rather than at install-time, and shipped as
a part of the kernel package. This would avoid user errors, and
mkinitcpio run-time problems.

This fallback image should contain the widest sets of hooks and
modules so that it should work on any hardware and any setup (at least
to the extent possible with our current hooks).

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Tom


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