Comment # 27 on bug 1213222 from Stefan Hundhammer

(In reply to Alexander Kruppa from comment #25)
> (In reply to Stefan Hundhammer from comment #19)
> > I'd be interested to hear if there was any error pop-up about that failure.
> > I don't see anything in the logs.
> 
> There was a pop-up which gave the full dracut output, including errors like
> the
> 
> dracut-install: Failed to find module 'atiixp'
> 
> line you already mentioned.

Okay, that's the most important thing. So the error was reported.


> What was missing, imho, was a notification from Yast that dracut failing
> results in an unbootable system.

This is already where speculations and dracut expert knowledge start. We don't
really KNOW that; we can make assumptions. Dracut did something. Maybe it did
create an initrd that can be used for at least rudimentary booting. Maybe it
didn't create anything.

But whatever happened, it's bad, and it's not easy to overcome for any normal
user; even advanced users will struggle with it. This is something that simply
should not happen. If it happens, things have already gone downhill.



> This is probably blindingly obvious for
> people familiar with the Linux boot process, but it wasn't for me. Ideally
> it would be nice to point out that the non-existant modules are listed in
> the INITRD_MODULES variable in /etc/sysconfig/kernel file.

...which is actually no longer true; it was a kludge on top of a kludge, the
'mkinitrd' script that is deprecated and may be completely dropped very soon
reading values from /etc/sysconfig/kernel and feeding them to the new dracut
mechanisms that work completely differently.

We can't provide a dracut tutorial at that point. And we also don't want to,
because those things have a tendency to change over time (see mkinitrd), and
then the information that we give the user becomes increasingly outdated or
maybe even completely wrong.

For the brave and adventurous, this is the time to read dracut documentation
online or read forums and start experimenting. Less enterprising users might
try to reinstall or simply give up. That's sad, but I don't see how we can
improve the situation significantly.

That situation should simply not happen.