Messages in this thread | | | From | Frans Pop <> | Subject | Re: Linux mdadm superblock question. | Date | Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:29:05 +0100 |
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On Wednesday 17 February 2010, Gabor Gombas wrote: > On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 02:26:46PM +0100, Frans Pop wrote: > > That's simply not true, at least not for Debian. If you actually use > > the distro tools [1] the only assumptions are made at kernel > > *installation* time, not at kernel build time. > > And that's why network-booted diskless clients and virtual guests have > all sort of useless modules loaded; the HW where the kernel package was > installed in this case is very different from the HW where the kernel > will run.
Interesting use case. But also a use case for which initramfs-tools probably very simply was never intended.
I agree that in this case you probably want to either - have a very generic initrd that supports anything (Debian default) [1] or - provide a list of modules to include in the initrd based on knowing the hardware you want to support (e.g. using /etc/initramfs-tools/modules) and prevent including anything based on the host system.
I've never really done that so I don't know if initramfs-tools has any features to support that.
> If only there were a switch to prohibit ever looking at the > current machine's configuration when generating the initramfs...
Did you ever file a wishlist bug report for that?
> > I've been using initramfs-tools generated initrds for years without > > problems, and that includes "root on LVM on LUKS encrypted partition" > > and "root on LVM on RAID" setups. > > I've tried a couple of times to use a Debian-built initramfs with a > custom built kernel. The kernel worked fine without an initramfs (it had > everything built in), but it did not boot with the initramfs.
It's obviously hard to comment on something like this without more details (which would be off-topic for this list).
[1] Could still leave you with problems if the clients use something fancy for the root fs that uses info copied from /etc.
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