# Do you prefer dracut or genkernel?

## crocket

Both work, but genkernel's initial ramdisk seems to produce prettier boot messages.

What do you prefer?

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## Koyan

Bliss-initramfs. Works the best for me with root on zfs.

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## NeddySeagoon

crocket,

I like to know what's in my system, so when it breaks, I can put the pieces together again.

I dislike all the autoblackmagic equally.

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## crocket

 *Koyan wrote:*   

> Bliss-initramfs. Works the best for me with root on zfs.

 

LOL. https://github.com/fearedbliss/bliss-initramfs says bliss-initramfs is unmaintained. Welcome to genkernel.

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> I dislike all the autoblackmagic equally.

 

What do you use to generate initial ramdisk?

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## NeddySeagoon

crocket,

The method described here.

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## crocket

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> crocket,
> 
> The method described here.

 

I thought I was driving gentoo like a car with a stick shift. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1093724.html was truly a mind fuck.

It seems a stick shift is still a high-level abstraction for you. Are you taming a difficult horse?

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## NeddySeagoon

crocket,

Whenever you use the 'black box' solution to solve a problem, someone, sometime, had to understard the problem well enough to create the 'black box' for you to use.

I'm not saying that  'black box' solutions are inherently bad, just that they don't always work and when that happens you have no understanding of what went wrong.

By all means use  black boxs to delay the learning opportunity but don't put it off forever. One day, you will wish you hadn't, then its too late.

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## nlsa8z6zoz7lyih3ap

I write my own, basically using the method refereed to by Neddy

I find it much easier than trying to understand either Dracut or genkernel.

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## Koyan

 *crocket wrote:*   

>  *Koyan wrote:*   Bliss-initramfs. Works the best for me with root on zfs. 
> 
> LOL. https://github.com/fearedbliss/bliss-initramfs says bliss-initramfs is unmaintained. Welcome to genkernel.
> 
> 

 

Thanks for the info. Did you have to LOL though?

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## Muso

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> crocket,
> 
> I like to know what's in my system, so when it breaks, I can put the pieces together again.
> 
> I dislike all the autoblackmagic equally.

 

++

Same.  Plus, I like having a kernel that doesn't include a bunch of modules that I will never use.

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## Naib

no initramFS so neither. my use cases do not need one so I don't.

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## Syl20

On my laptop, using LVM+LUKS, I wrote my own initramfs generator script, using this and this. That took some time to make it work, but I learnt lots of things on how that works. So those spent hours were absolutely not a waste of time.

On all the other boxes I own, I don't use an initramfs. I don't need it, even with a separate /usr filesystem/partition.

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## msst

I use genkernels initramfs on a small server. Tried dracut, more complicated on the server, not working correctly on the desktop.

On that desktop I use better-initramfs. Both systems use full-disk encryption dmcrypt-luks and btrfs. This configuration is not easy generally and requires an initramfs.

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## crocket

 *msst wrote:*   

> I use genkernels initramfs on a small server. Tried dracut, more complicated on the server, not working correctly on the desktop.
> 
> On that desktop I use better-initramfs. Both systems use full-disk encryption dmcrypt-luks and btrfs. This configuration is not easy generally and requires an initramfs.

 

If you use full-disk encryption, can it be woken up remotely? You would have to type password whenever you wake it up.

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## Zucca

Currently I use initramfs on my desktop and server. On both setups /boot (and /boot/efi) are located on an USB memory stick. All the disks on my systems have no partition tables, but are all formatted/filled with btrfs.

Since I use multi-device btrfs it's pretty complicated to boot without iniramfs. Well.. Tehnically I could boot kernel with rootfsflags=device=/dev/sda,device=/dev/sdb,device=/dev/sdc,device=/dev/sdd,device=/dev/sde, but it's not recommended.

I have had ideas of creating my own initramfs, but hadn't really put too much thought to it... yet. So my current solution is to use genkernel.

One another way would be to supply custom linuxrc for genkernel. That would possibly be a pretty good "middle ground".

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## msst

 *Quote:*   

> If you use full-disk encryption, can it be woken up remotely? You would have to type password whenever you wake it up.

 

You probably mean suspend to disk, which I do not use anyway. One could probably get it to work by using an unencrypted swap, but that defeats the purpose. Suspend to ram works on the desktop without problems.

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## bammbamm808

Manual after emerging new sources. It's really not so bad once you get used to it. and Gives you much more control over and insight into the workings of your system. Have never emerged Genkerel. I know vaguely what it is, but have no use of it.

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## Maitreya

Only use genkernel-next for the machine that has root in raid btrfs.

Does anyone know other initramfs builders that support root raid btrfs/plymouth?

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## bunder

i didn't use an initrd for many years until i switched to zfs...  afaik, even if you build the modules into the kernel, you still need an initrd to import your pool and mount datasets.  that said, i'm currently using dracut because genkernel had bugs at the time.  it was suggested to me that genkernel would switch to dracut for initrd generation, but last time i checked, that hadn't happened.

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## SpiderPigLoki

Little late to the party, but for me it's dracut.

Genkernel (and Genkernel-Next) have the nasty bug of not being able to properly work with LUKS and s2disk.

EDIT: Fixed typo

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## fturco

I'm happy to use dracut on my desktop computer with a LUKS-encrypted btrfs root partition.

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