[openstack-dev] [TripleO] Building deploy ramdisks with dracut

Ben Nemec openstack at nemebean.com
Fri Jul 4 03:12:53 UTC 2014


I've recently been looking into using dracut to build the
deploy-ramdisks that we use for TripleO.  There are a few reasons for
this: 1) dracut is a fairly standard way to generate a ramdisk, so users
are more likely to know how to debug problems with it.  2) If we build
with dracut, we get a lot of the udev/net/etc stuff that we're currently
doing manually for free.  3) (aka the self-serving one ;-) RHEL 7
doesn't include busybox, so we can't currently build ramdisks on that
distribution using the existing ramdisk element.

For the RHEL issue, this could just be an alternate way to build
ramdisks, but given some of the other benefits I mentioned above I
wonder if it would make sense to look at completely replacing the
existing element.  From my investigation thus far, I think dracut can
accommodate all of the functionality in the existing ramdisk element,
and it looks to be available on all of our supported distros.

So that's my pitch in favor of using dracut for ramdisks.  Any thoughts?
 Thanks.

https://dracut.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page

-Ben



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