A couple of rawhide surprises

[Peter Jones]

On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 13:49 -0700, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> Nalin Dahyabhai <nalin at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > This is what the initscripts changelog says about it:
> >   - don't mount /sys and /proc in rc.sysinit - the initrd already does
> > Are you not using an initrd?
> 
> Nope, no initrd.  In all my years of using Linux I've never really found
> a situation where I needed one...  
> 
> Clearly this change won't bother anybody running a stock kernel, but I
> bet I'm not the only nonconformist who will get bitten.

So, we've put some logic back into rc.sysinit to check and conditionally
mount them.  The initrd pretty much has to mount them these days, and it
doesn't make sense to unmount then remount, so that's why we don't
*need* it if you're using an FC kernel.  But if we don't have to break
not using one, we may as well not.

FWIW, the way things are looking you'll have to have an initrd in the
not too distant future, because e.g. qlogic cards will need firmware
loaded from userland before mounting filesystems.  IMHO this is coming
while our (and by that I mean the kernel's) firmware loading subsystem
is far too primitive and hastily thought out, but such is life.  Today's
nash knows how to load firmware, though right now mkinitrd doesn't know
to copy firmware into the image.  It's currently not something that you
can detect, either.

-- 
  Peter