A couple of rawhide surprises

[Jonathan Corbet]

Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:

> Right now, if you're not using an initrd, you already have to:
> 
> 1) make sure your storage driver is built in (might be, in our stock kernels)
> 2) make sure your root fs type is built in (requires your own kernel)
> 3) make sure you have some sort of prefilled /dev created (requires your own /dev
>    or udev)

If you're running your own mainline kernel (being a proper citizen and
testing 2.6.16-rc3, say), the first two are fairly likely anyway.  Why
configure a kernel which lacks the stuff you know you're going to need
always?  Honestly, I've never thought about /dev contents - it just
works, IF /proc and /sys are mounted.

Kernels without initrd have always Just Worked for me, since 1993.

> So, generally, we require an initrd. I suppose I could put the lines
> in for now and relnote that booting without an initrd is deprecated, and
> support may be explicitly removed post-FC5.

That might be a nice thing to do.  I'll certainly cope regardless, but a
couple of "mount" lines will not be the key to speeding up the boot
process, and thus shouldn't really harm anybody.  One of Fedora's goals
is to work with a mainline kernel, as I recall; ensuring that the needed
virtual filesystems are mounted can only help along those lines.

A couple of other notes:

	- I approached that massive update with a fair amount of
          trepidation.  The actual resulting problems have been minimal,
          and I'm pretty well pleased by that.  I trepidated in vain.

	- Would the person sending challenge-response messages to
          fedora-test postings (that would appear to be
          eorgan945.sspam at uol.com.br) please stop?

Thanks,

jon

Jonathan Corbet
Executive editor, LWN.net
corbet at lwn.net