[Yaird-devel] Booting fails after moving to another hardware: unable to find root partition

[Reiner Nix]

So I try with the initramfs-tools for me.
Thanks for your comments and keep on working on the yaird way.


> On Tue, 21 Mar 2006 23:08:50 +0100
>
> Reiner Benedikt Nix <reiner.nix at web.de> wrote:
> > Problem for using dpkg-reconfigure: as on the new hardware the system
> > is yet not running, regeneration cannot determine the targent
> > hardware and vice versa :-(
>
> Sorry that I did not pay enough attention to your scenario: Yaird does
> not generate a general purpose ramdisk that you can transfer to another
> host and it will magically work. For "magical" ramdisks, please use
> initramfs-tools instead.
>
> What you can do with yaird is explicitly load some modules in addition
> to the ones automatically detected, and override the mount routine with
> some homebrewn stuff. Neither of that is interesting if you don't know
> ahead what you will need on your future host, however - then you need
> magic which is oart of initramfs-tools design but not yaird.
>
> > Fo me it was sufficient to regenerate the initial ram disk manually.
> > Of course I need the SATA driver to access the hard disk. Otherwise
> > it seemed to be enough to just changing the root partition name.
> > Funtunately, the generated initial ram disk has a very clear
> > structure, so applying the change could be done easily.
> >
> > It would be nice, if the root partition name passed as boot parameter
> > could be used. This would be helpfull as I use to make copies of the
> > root partition for backup purpose, regularly on the same hardware but
> > on another hard disk.
>
> Knowing the root device name is not enough. The device also needs to be
> created, and chains of modules needs to be loaded.
>
> Yaird resolves dependencies _before_ boot, include only modules really
> needed to get the rootfs, and generate custom shell code to do so, to
> keep the ramdisk as small as possible.
>
> As comparison, initramfs-tools includes a bunch of modules, includes
> udev on the ramdisk and rely on that to do the resolving at boot time.
>
>
> It would indeed be great for yaird to have more flexibility, but it
> sounds like what you want is exactly the behaviour of initramfs-tools,
> and I don't think it is relevant nor interesting to change yaird into
> behaving like initramfs-tools.
>
>
> I am interested in concrete suggestions to have yaird support rootfs
> passed on at boot time, while preserving its fundamental logic of
> staying minimal and being smart at build time rather than at boot time.
>
>  - Jonas

-- 
Reiner B. Nix
reiner.nix at web.de	       Südstraße 44
Tel.: +49 (0)241 60 46 20      D-52064 Aachen