Re: RFC: OpenRC as Init System for Debian

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Svante Signell]
> Init is about the boot of the computer, right? Who is stupid enough
> to put in a usb stick _during_ the boot? We need to separate boot
> from adding/removing peripheral devices!

You seem to misunderstand the problem.  I will try to give a short
explanation.

The problem at hand is that adding entries to fstab do not work
reliably for USB disks.  If you have the users home directories (or
any other disk that should be mounted during boot) on a USB disk, the
device might not be working when the boot get to the point in time
where it try to mount partitions.  This also happen for SCSI and
network disks.

Say you want to mount a network disk during boot.  This depend on the
network being configured.  This in turn might depend on a DHCP reply
from a DHCP server, and to send the DHCP request the network card need
to be detected.  To detect the network card, the network driver need
to be loaded, and the network card need to be found on the PCI or some
other internal bus.  And with the Linux kernel today, there is no way
to know when during boot the network card will be found on the bus.
To make this work reliably, the boot system need to be event based,
not sequence based.

There are other scenarios where the boot often fail too, but I guess
you get the idea. :)
-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen