ata and scsi modules in initrd (was: Re: Bootup speed for F8)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 02.12.2007 12:31, David Zeuthen wrote:
>
> There's a host of other problems with mkinitrd that I won't go into
> here.

There is something about mkinitrd I'd like to bring up while we're
discussing its problems here.

Fedora afaics normally has a "hardware should just work" approach (which
is a good thing). But why do we have only the modules in the initrd
which are strictly needed on the system where the initrd was created?
Shouldn't we put the most important ones into the inird and load them on
demand if the root-fs could not be found with the default module?

Sure, with the current approach the initrd is small. But if you take the
harddisk and connect it to another storage controller or an motherboard
with a different chipset vendor then in most cases Fedora won't boot
there (ahci will hopefully solve that sooner or later, but that's a
different topic).

Heck, it's even worse: on those popular Intel chipsets (ICH5 and later)
you can configure the integrated storage controller in different ways
through the BIOS Setup. As you need different drivers depending on the
settings you might run into situations like this sometimes:

* you get your new computer where somebody enabled ahci in the BIOS
Setup for you
* you install F8 during which an initrd with the ahci module gets created
* you have problems with the system and do a BIOS update (during which
its settings from the BIOS Setup normally get reseted; thus ahci is off
again and the storage controller gets a different PCI-ID)
* you try to boot F8 and it won't find the root filesystem, because the
module (ata_piix) with drives the chipsets storage controller in its
default mode is missing in the initrd -> trouble that a lot of our users
are unable to solve

Cu
knurd