Proposed F19 Feature: Dracut HostOnly

[Harald Hoyer]

Am 29.01.2013 16:53, schrieb Dennis Gilmore:
> El Tue, 29 Jan 2013 14:45:34 +0000
> Jaroslav Reznik <jreznik at redhat.com> escribió:
>> = Features/DracutHostOnly =
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DracutHostOnly
> 
>> Feature owner(s): Harald Hoyer <harald at redhat.com>
> 
>> Only create "host-only" initramfs images. A generic fallback image
>> should be installed by anaconda on installation/update and never ever
>> be removed.  
> 
>> == Detailed description ==
>> Current initramfs images contain most of the kernel drivers to boot
>> from any hardware. This results in a very big initramfs, which takes
>> a long time to load on system start and a long time to create on
>> kernel updates. Switching to host-only will improve the situation. To
>> cope with hardware change, a boot entry "Rescue System" should be
>> installed with a full fledged initramfs also containing debug tools.
>> This boot entry can then be used to recover from hardware changes and
>> also from unforseen software failure after updates.
> 
> as legal has said we cannot pregenerate initramfses i think this should
> be a non-starter. even loading a 20mb initramfs from a sdcard on a slow
> arm box doesnt take that long, and id personally much rather be able to
> change hardware or yank the drive  and put it into a different box
> without worrying about making sure i have the right initramfs bits in
> place. at least to me the costs outweigh the benefits. the grub timeout
> on my laptop/desktops is longer than the time it takes to load the
> initramfs. 
> 
> Dennis

If you are running a lot of virtual machines, you will care about
a) boot time
b) disk size
c) yum update time (including generation of the initramfs)