Re: dracut-ng

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

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.

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