Re: dracut-ng

[Stefan Schantl <stefan.schantl@ipfire.org>]

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

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.

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.
> > > 
> > > 
> > 
>