Hi Stefan,

On 07/09/2025 19:50, Adolf Belka wrote:

Hi Stefan,

On 07/09/2025 19:09, Stefan Schantl wrote:

Hi Adolf,

Hi Stefan,

On 07/09/2025 14:29, Stefan Schantl wrote:

Hello Adolf,

Hi Michael & all,

On 02/09/2025 16:00, Michael Tremer wrote:

Hello Adolf,

Yes, I would be happy for you to give this a try.

Since Harald Hoyer has left RedHat, it seems that dracut has

effectively been abandoned and dracut-ng is the successor with

pretty much the same people contributing to it.

I did not find any breaking changes in the change log (although

it

seems quite extensive), so we might have a very good chance to

indeed ship it as a drop-in.

Let us know what you find out during testing it :)

So I tested dracut-ng using the newest version 108. When I

installed

IPFire, it built my raid system, it partitioned the disk, created

the

filesystem, mounted them and installed the system.

Then it failed with the message Unable to install the language

cache.

So I then built version 100 and it did exactly the same.

Then I thought, maybe I had commented out something in the

rootfile

that was needed so I did a build with all the rootfile lines

uncommented.

It still failed exactly the same.

Any help or suggestions on how I can debug this would be

gratefully

accepted.

This happens because the setup utils tries to launch the "chroot"

binary and ties to execute the the required command to generate the

update cache within the changed root directory.

https://git.ipfire.org/?p=ipfire-2.x.git;a=blob;f=src/installer/main.c;h=9b9c630c35fa44ecb372f58cccad64806c198af4;hb=HEAD#l763

In our current used version of dracut the "chroot" binary is part

of

the base and always is present in a generated initramdisk.

During development of dracut and dracut-ng the developers decided,

that

"chroot" does not have to be packed as default into an initramdisk.

https://github.com/dracut-ng/dracut-ng/commit/518133714b769160448a51c512d5e152ea6332da

Yes, so I see it was already in the old dracut version 058. If I had

tried updating from our current version 054 to 058, I would have had

the same problem.

So the chroot binary now manually must be specified to be part of

the

initramdisk.

Something like "dracut --install "/usr/sbin/chroot" <xyz> " should

to

the trick.

Giving it a try currently in a build.

Thanks very much for your help on this.

I think the following line in "lfs/cdrom" needs to be extended with the

"--install" from abouve.

https://git.ipfire.org/?p=ipfire-2.x.git;a=blob;f=lfs/cdrom;h=a25141fc20d82b68a0f10c2a40bfe3831ae1a713;hb=HEAD#l170

With your suggestion and a bit of searching that was where I made the change. However I am also sure that without your suggestion I would still have been looking for how to fix this for a month of Sundays.

My build is nearly finished so I will see if that fixes the install.

Thanks very much Stefan. The built version was able to successfully install a working IPFire and I could restore a previously working version.

Regards,

Adolf.

One question I have will I also need to apply the same change to the dracut command in linux-initrd for the image generation?

Regards,

Adolf.

-Stefan

Regards,

Adolf.

Best regards,

-Stefan

Regards,

Adolf.

Best,

-Michael

On 2 Sep 2025, at 13:13, Adolf Belka <adolf.belka@ipfire.org>

wrote:

Hi All,

I was looking at packages that needed updating. I noticed

that

dracut was at version 056. The source for that had version

059

but that was from Dec 2022 and the last commit in that repo

was

Mar 2024.

There is a new repo providing dracut-ng. Their version 100

(Apr

2024) is said to be a drop-in replacement for the original

dracut. They are now at version 108 and it is being actively

maintained.

With it being said to be a drop-in replacement I thought

dracut-

ng looked a good candidate to test out but as dracut plays a

critical role in the booting process I thought I would ask if

anyone has any information to indicate that it is not worth

trying it.

Regards,

Adolf.