Dracut Questions

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 14:49:55 -0600,
  Petrus de Calguarium <kwhiskerz at gmail.com> wrote:
> If I want to change to dracut, what do I do? Which packages 
> do I need to install, etc?

For awhile dracut was getting used when kernels were built (and hence you
may have used it withotu realizing it). But because of concerns of being
able to provide appropriate source, things were switch to doing it in
post install, similar to how mkinitrd is used.

> Does it make an initram on the fly, or do I install a 
> package? I noticed that there is dracut-kernel and dracut-
> generic available, along with a host of other packages.

You need at least dracut and dracut-kernel. Installing a recent kernel
should pull those in.

> Do I uninstall nash and initrd? Or do I keep them as a fall-
> back? If so, how would I configure that? What changes do I 
> make to grub.conf and elsewhere to enable dracut and disable 
> nash/initrd?

You don't need to do that.

> A concern: Does it work reliably? I am not going to face a 
> situation where I boot and encounter a kernel panic and be 
> unable to get into my system because there is no initram or 
> something? That could be almost impossible to solve :-(

If that happens you can still boot the previous kernel. (I even needed to
do that for an earlier version of dracut that had problems with not
using the suggested minor device numbers for raid arrays.) If you do
have a problem, be sure to file a bug.