This is a brilliant idea that takes the initrd design exactly to the
point where it should go. We can also get rid of plenty of odd stuff
in /proc/sys with that.
This may actually be the right time to digest the experience people
had so far with initrd. I think the basic concept is fine, but there
might be room for improvements in the "care and feeding" section,
namely:
- "on the fly" updates: not mainly an initrd issue, but if the
underlying file system is able to grow, hard disk-based initrds
would become easier to maintain. (The general goal is to keep
initrd as small as possible.)
- shared libraries: I think it would be great if we had some means
to generate a customized libc without recompiling, e.g. scan all
the executables for symbols, then copy the relevant modules from
the system's libc to a new, smaller libc. Right now, it's either
static linking or a lot of guesswork (and hours of libc
recompilation). Does this sound feasible ?
Are there any other problems initrd users have experienced ?
Thanks,
- Werner
-- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, DI-LRC,EPFL,CH werner.almesberger@lrc.di.epfl.ch / /_IN_R_133__Tel_+41_21_693_6621__Fax_+41_21_693_6610_____________________/