Re: dracut-ng

[Adolf Belka <adolf.belka@ipfire.org>]

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.

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.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>