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CaptainBlood
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Joined: 24 Jan 2010
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 Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2014 3:59 am Post subject: Is initramfs speeding up boot?[SOLVED] |
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Hi, dear all,
Before I start to tweak, & possibly break everything, I beg 4 your opinion whether initramfs should speed up my boot or not.
My laptop is layout is quite simple, single ext4 partition.
Thks 4 ur attention.
Last edited by CaptainBlood on Wed Jul 30, 2014 4:16 am; edited 1 time in total |
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The Doctor
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Joined: 27 Jul 2010
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| Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2014 4:14 am Post subject: |
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No an initramfs will most certainly not do so. At best it will have a negligible impact.
The reason for this is simple. An The initramfs must do things that are repeated during init, like populating /dev etc.
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First things first, but not necessarily in that order.
Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box. |
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CaptainBlood
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xaviermiller
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Location: ~Brussels - Belgique
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| Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2014 6:41 am Post subject: |
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The initramfs is only needed if the kernel cannot mount the root partition na(t)ively, for example with a RAID or encrypted system, or kernel modules that need special actions, or have a beautiful splash screen.
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Xavier Miller |
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netixen
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Joined: 26 Sep 2013
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| Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2014 3:56 pm Post subject: |
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| In my humble opinion initramfs is just an ugly hack. If you can live without it you can save yourself unnecessary complexity. |
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frostschutz
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Joined: 22 Feb 2005
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Location: Germany
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| Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2014 5:58 pm Post subject: |
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| CaptainBlood wrote: | | Still wondering what initramfs is good for? |
also explained here https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Custom_Initramfs
| netixen wrote: | | In my humble opinion initramfs is just an ugly hack. |
What's the alternative? Implementing stuff into the kernel, that can already done by userspace tools, is uglier by far.
Initramfs is dead simple, it's unfortunate that most people consider it a black box when it's really not... |
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netixen
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Joined: 26 Sep 2013
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| Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2014 7:10 pm Post subject: |
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| frostschutz wrote: | What's the alternative? Implementing stuff into the kernel, that can already done by userspace tools, is uglier by far.
Initramfs is dead simple, it's unfortunate that most people consider it a black box when it's really not... |
I agree it works and i have used initrd and later initramfs when they are really needed.
But I too like you prefer 'simple' and for systems like my personal workstation that don't need to support everything and the kitchen-sink -
boot manager > linux kernel > init is perfectly fine since i don't have RAID, encrypted root or need a networked file system at boot.
If you ask most users why they use initramfs they can't even tell you, most probably have a kernel with modules even thou their hardware rarely changes. Less use lvm because their distro does and will probably never really use it. And all that is fine for the regular user who wants everything to just work.
An "ugly hack" was probably a phrase too loaded for what is a tool to solve a specific need. I as a professional like to use the proper tool for the job and not hammer down on
stuff that is not a nail. |
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frostschutz
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| Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2014 7:19 pm Post subject: |
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| netixen wrote: | | boot manager > linux kernel > init is perfectly fine since i don't have RAID, encrypted root or need a networked file system at boot. |
Sure, that's perfectly fine. But that's not how it works for everyone - I have RAID, LUKS and LVM and I'm very glad to be able to make my own Initramfs to handle it properly. |
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