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 -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
