On 11/20/2012 1:54 AM, Per Jessen wrote:
Linda Walsh wrote:
Per Jessen wrote:
Philipp Thomas wrote:
You can't use safety as a reason for initrd -- it's has a proven track record of having problems. What do you call a proven track record? And don't vaguely point to mailing lists but name them.
I've been using initrd since SUSE started using it and never had a problem with it.
Ditto.
And how many times have you downloaded and rebuilt your kernel? Or how many times have you loaded rpms from factor in the past month? Look at the opensuse-factory list -- they had to use rescue disks for a week, week before last, because it was broken.
Yeah I saw that - I don't think that is indicative of the generate state of using an initrd.
If you do anything in the boot or kernel area, it makes things incredibly complicated. When was the last time you needed to do an xfs_check on a disk that didn't come up? initrd will fail because it won't mount -- but will need a rescue disk to run xfs's file system checker.
I don't use xfs, but I regularly fiddle with booting with root on NFS or over iSCSI. I feel quite comfortable with working with the initrd.
I have an old server I just spent half a day fighting with that for some reason can boot from usb, but yet the bootloader can not then load further files. initrd doesn't work there. Actually, it can load files apparently because I can navigate around a set of syslinux menus, so there must be some memory addressing problem where the initrd gets loaded somewhere that the kernel then can't find or the bios screws it up or ??? who knows, but initrd doesn't work at least not from usb. And the cd drive has filled up with dust and died or just doesn't like any of the blank cd's I happen to have (it successfully booted a sco open server 5.0.7 install cd which I needed to use just to do a temp install to read off one HTFS filesystem before installing linux), and the floppy drive is way too small for current kernels, and it's a customer's site with no pxe server, although I suppose I could run a pxe server from my laptop, or get them a new cd drive... Today they still don't have a running server because I couldn't get any kind of installer to work, because I too usually have no problem with initrd. It always worked before. So I didn't have a new cd drive in my pocket. Point is, initrd is nice, and most of the time it can be loaded by the booting mechanism and most of the time there is plenty of ram to waste on it. But not always. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org