Re: In preparation for 2.6.13 - initrd issues

[Jurij Smakov <jurij@wooyd.org>]

Thanks to everyone for feedback. The situation is somewhat more clear now. 
In summary:

* d-i is fine as far as we keep the traditional initrd support for a
  while. As Bastian mentioned, it is pretty much guaranteed that it is
  going to be supported until 2.6.15, which gives the d-i team some time
  to make the transition.

* yaird vs initramfs for initrd generation - both seem to be in a somewhat
  similar state. Both appear to be usable on mainstream architectures,
  with the status on other architectures largely unknown. Advantage of
  yaird is that it's capable of including needed modules only, while
  initramfs requires a predefined list. I would say that the only
  criterion here is support for larger amount of architectures. And
  probably a sensible thing to do at that point is to test both on as much
  architectures as possible to figure out what still needs to be done.

* libc issue: klibc is about to enter archive. However Bastian mentions
  that the tools which are supposed to use it when running off initrd
  are not very happy with it. Maximilian, could you comment on that
  please? I believe that stabilizing a new libc version (porting it to all
  arches, making sure that executables linked against it work, etc) will
  take a lot of time, unless such an effort is already under way. For me
  it looks reasonable to use glibc on initrd for 2.6.13 and work on
  improving klibc usability in the meantime.

One thing which I am not too comfortable with yet, is how we are going to 
switch to an alternative initrd generator in the kernel deb postinsts. 
The command to generate initrd is currently configurable in 
/etc/kernel-img.conf, which is owned by kernel-package, so the actual 
kernel packages cannot easily fiddle with it. A suggestion by Jonas 
for yaird to provide mkinitrd script and conflict with initrd-tools is not 
too good either, as people might want to have 2.6.12 and 2.6.13 installed 
at the same time. Anybody has any thoughts on that?

Please keep your comments coming.

Best regards,

Jurij Smakov                                        jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/                   KeyID: C99E03CC