dracut, or should booting a LiveCD touch the hard disk?

[Ray Strode]

Hi,

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 3:39 AM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Ray Strode wrote:
>> There's a reason why plymouth doesn't identify the volume in the initrd.
>> Plymouth is graphical and so would need to ship fonts, font
>> renderering libraries, and translations in the initrd to display text.
>> That's a non-starter.
>
> Could we prerender the text on initrd creation time using ImageMagick or
> whatever?
That's a creative solution that we could potentially do, but it has a
few problems;

1) It won't scale nicely with everything else
2) Getting the interaction between plymouth and the initrd right would
be a little complicated.
We'd have to pass a list of strings that dracut uses back to plymouth,
plymouth would have to write out those images in a place it knows
about,
know to use them from the splash, and know to pack them in the initrd.

It's doable, but awkward, and something we haven't needed yet.

Note, plymouth *does* support text once / is mounted.  It dynamically
loads the fonts and font renderering libraries, etc, as soon as
they're
needed after they're availabe.  So you still get "/home is password
protected" or whatever when /home is unlocked at boot.

This is only about what's unlocked in the initrd, which should only be
one thing, since that's the initrd is only supposed to do one thing:
mount /.

--Ray