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

[Tobias Hunger]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 12:51 AM, Lennart Poettering
<lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
<snip>

> 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.

Of course I do create a new initrd for each new /usr (its my scripts,
nothing arch does).

But I keep the initrd and the kernel in /usr and only copy them if
their sha does not match up with any of the other kernels/initrds that
were installed to /boot already. No need to have the same file twice,
my /boot partition is not that big. I did steal that from ostree:-)

I had expected that the initrds will be shared between a couple of my
daily snapshots, but it seems like I did not take the timestamps of
the files in the initrd into account.

Well, I still got some more things to clean up before I will bother
about those. So for now I will live with one initrd per /usr.

>> 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!

No hurry. I just copy a patched systemd-fstab-generator into all the
images that get generated. I did this setup so things like that would
be easy. Well, actually I did it because I wanted to play with atomic
upgrades;-)

Best Regards,
Tobias