On Sat, Jan 02, 2016 at 01:11:07PM -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Jan 2016 09:08:37 +0000
> KatolaZ <katolaz@???> wrote:
>
>
> > If your root fs does not change every five minutes, you can have a
> > custom kernel with ext4 and a few other drivers compiled in, and get
> > rid of initramfs altogether. Then, the usage that has been done of
> > initramfs in the last few years is just an overkill, IMHO.
>
> This was exactly my point. Why can't Devuan put the ext4 kernel module
> and the few other drivers for ext4, on directories directly off the
> root partition, plus the stub of an rc file to bring the thing to the
> mounted state. This would make Devuan the only distro giving the user
> an easy choice of initramfs or not.
>

Steve,

just because not everybody wants to use ext4, not everybody has the
same disc controller, not everybody has the same configuration of
raid/lvm/whatever. Again, the installer of a distro should be able to
install on *any* supported hw/sw configuration. There are basically
two ways to do so:

1) build and ship a kernel with everything compiled-in, which might
not be any more a viable option, since it would be impossible in some
cases to load the full image into RAM at boot time;

2) use an initrd/initramfs with all the potentially useful modules,
and let the kernel figure out which of them have to be loaded during
boot, which is what happens now.

Then, after install, you are free to compile your own custom kernel,
containing only the modules you need in your specific machine, and get
rid of initrd/initramfs.

HND

KatolaZ

--
[ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ]
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