Lemme add initramfs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx to Cc again. I hope that's the
correct ML dracut folks use.
On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 01:08:41PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Yes, I agree that it's not optimal, but I would hate to have some odd
> "let's add another ELF note" churn too, for (presumably) increasingly
> obscure reasons.
Right, my angle with the ELF note is that it is at least something well
establshed and other things use it too (Xen, BUILD_SALT, other arches
too).
> It looks like dracut has been doing this forever, and in fact back in
> 2015 apparently had the exact same issue (that never made it to kernel
> developers, or at least not to me), when the kernel
> CONFIG_MICROCODE_xyz_EARLY config went away, and became just
> CONFIG_MICROCODE_xyz.
Yap, that was me. I merged the early loader because it didn't make any
sense to have a separate thing.
> The whole "check kernel config" in dracut seems to go back to 2014, so
> it's been that way for almost a decade by now.
>
> Honestly, I think the right approach may be to just remove the check
> again from dracut entirely - the intent seems to be to make the initrd
> smaller when people don't support microcode updates, but does that
> ever actually *happen*?
That thought also crossed my mind. With the mitigations sh*te, you
basically must build in microcode. Lemme cook up a dracut patch for this
tomorrow and see what happens.
> There are dracut command lines, like "--early-microcode" and
> "--no-early-microcode", so people who really want to save space could
> just force it that way. Doing the CONFIG_xyz check seems broken.
Yap, exactly.
> I guess we on the kernel side could help with "make install" etc, but
> we've (intentionally) tried to insulate us from distros having
> distro-specific installkernel scripts, so we don't really haev a good
> way to pass information down to the installkernel side.
>
> It *would* make sense if we just had some actual arguments we might
> pass down. Right now we just do
>
> exec "${file}" "${KERNELRELEASE}" "${KBUILD_IMAGE}" System.map
> "${INSTALL_PATH}"
>
> so basically the only argument we pass down is that INSTALL_PATH
> (which is just "/boot" by default).
Right, and on debian they run initramfs-tools as part of
a post-installation step at the end of /sbin/installkernel which could
then pass in more configuration info.
Yap, that could be one way to do it. We could document it in
scripts/install.sh or somewhere more prominent so that tools can look it
up.
Yap, all better ideas than parsing .config.
Thx.
--
Regards/Gruss,
Boris.
https://people.kernel.org/tglx/notes-about-netiquette
