[systemd-devel] So how am I supposed to put together my Linux system?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 22.10.14 21:08, Tobias Hunger (tobias.hunger at gmail.com) wrote:

> > My idea would be that the initrd contains that info. Each usr tree
> > comes with one initrd, and that initrd knows which usr tree to boot.
> 
> That implies that each installation snapshot must come with an initrd,
> even if the only change to earlier versions is the snapshot name. That
> sounds suboptimal to me.

Correct. I can see that for some uses this might appear as overkill,
but in general I would not make much of a distinction between the
kernel and the basic userspace here, they really belong together.

> I am following Arch and create new snapshots daily. For me the kernel
> updates way less often than the rest. The initrd does change for each
> snapshot though. I need to investigate what is causing that. I would
> have expected the initrd to change more often than the kernel, but
> definitely not for each update. Maybe mkinitcpio bakes in some
> timestamp or something.

I figure they want to make sure the files in the initrd are actually
always identical to the source they are copied from in /usr. That
kinda requires updating the initrd on each update of /usr.

> >> secure boot. That leaves EFI vars I think. Do those integrate with
> >> secure boot?
> >
> > Sure, we can store failure info in EFI Vars, no problem really.
> 
> I agree that this should work for secure boot and a classic
> distribution upgrade.
> 
> For my non-secure boot use case with incremental/daily upgrades the
> necessary changes to the systemd-fstab-generator were already merged
> (Thanks!), so I am waiting impatiently for the next systemd release to
> hit the arch repos.

I am working on it, but there are a couple of things I still need to
work on before the release. Sorry!

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat