[systemd-devel] Make systemd-localed modify the kernel commandline for the initrd keymap?

[Michael Chapman]

On Thu, 26 Sep 2019, Hans de Goede wrote:
[...]
> I believe that the best alternative is to have localed append / update
> a rd.vconsole.keymap=foo argument to the kernel commandline, to override
> the vconsole.conf KEYMAP setting, but only in the initrd (so that later
> runtime changes when booted still work).
> 
> The way I see this working is that localed does a read-modify-write of
> all the BLS .conf files under /boot/loader/entries and updates their
> "options" line to have rd.vconsole.keymap=foo appended or updated if
> already present.

To be honest, I really do think having the initrd rebuilt completely is a 
better approach... but I do not think localed should be directly 
responsible for that.

There are a lot of reasons the initrd needs to be rebuilt. Changing the 
system locale is just one of them. It seems unreasonable to have every 
tool know how to append boot parameters.

I would be a lot happier seeing a "well-known" binary that various things 
can call to rebuild the initrd, somewhat akin to the kernel-install we 
have already. That way distributions can plug in whatever tooling they use 
for initrds (e.g. dracut, initramfs-tools, ...)

Perhaps even just a new kernel-install verb, e.g:

   kernel-install refresh KERNEL-VERSION [KERNEL-IMAGE]

?