Re: [OSR-devel] [OSR-users] New Preview RPMs for next Release Candidate of comoonics-bootimage

[Gordan B. <go...@bo...>]

Marc Grimme wrote:

> * Updated the lite option in mkinitrd <gordans approch> to be more general and 
> not necessarily need "lsmod".

I'm curious - how do you get away from using lsmod to see what's needed? 
Or are you going to make me chance "yum update" and hope it works just 
to see the code? ;)

> * Implemented filters to globally remove files from initrd (Gordan's idea)

Is this due to (or coupled with) the approach of dumping all of the 
required files from the rpm database in one pass, rather than querying 
each packake in a separate rpm call?

> * Implemented an update feature in the initrd (see 
> https://bugzilla.atix.de/show_bug.cgi?id=340). That's a cool one. Updating an 
> initrd within seconds.

Why is this faster than rebuilding from scratch? What gets skipped? 
Compression stage has to remain, so the other big win can only be the 
rpm extraction query stage. If this was implemented in the single pass, 
then is it really that big a win?

> Some thoughts to sum up:
> 1. It is now possible to use the lite version of mkinitrd. It should reduce 
> the size of the initrd by 50%.
> Use -L if you want to include all loaded modules or if you need more modules 
> use either -M <modulename> or specify 
> in /etc/comoonics/comoonics-bootimage.cfg

How do you determine what modules are necessary vs what modules are 
currently loaded? Some of them are likely to be ambiguos, depending on 
the use case and rootfs type. Relying on what's loaded in the running 
system seems safer (except for the initial migration from standalone to 
shared root, but that might as well be a full fat initrd to get the 
system bootstrapped).

Gordan