Fedora 39 Looks To Ship mkosi-initrd As A Modern Alternative To Dracut

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 39 Looks To Ship mkosi-initrd As A Modern Alternative To Dracut

One of the recent change proposals for the in-development Fedora 39 is to ship systemd's mkosi-initrd as a modern and superior alternative to Dracut for constructing initrds...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-39-mkosi-initrd

[Vistaus]

More modern than Dracut? openSUSE switched to Dracut not too long ago, are you saying they switched from an old piece of software to another old one? And devs, please fix the name “mkosi-initrd” is one of the worst names I've ever heard. Even that other piece of recent software called Mold has a better name. Still bad because of the meaning of mold, but less bad than this one.

[boxie]

And devs, please fix the name “mkosi-initrd” is one of the worst names I've ever heard. Even that other piece of recent software called Mold has a better name. Still bad because of the meaning of mold, but less bad than this one.

Make operating system image... I like the name, it's descriptive and memorable.

And mold is an awesome name, let the devs have fun with their project names

[skeevy420]

More modern than Dracut? openSUSE switched to Dracut not too long ago, are you saying they switched from an old piece of software to another old one? And devs, please fix the name “mkosi-initrd” is one of the worst names I've ever heard. Even that other piece of recent software called Mold has a better name. Still bad because of the meaning of mold, but less bad than this one.

MaKe Open Systems Interconnection INITial Ram Disk

What a BRILLIANT acronym

It must be shit name day, because TrenchBoot is also a very bad name. Talk about not knowing history. For those who don't know, wearing boots in water-laden trenches lead to a horrible medical condition known as Trench Foot and the only fix was to remove your Trench Boots and let your feet dry or you'd end up getting your feet amputated.

What's next, replacing BASH with ShellShock?

[andyprough]

Currently, initrds built in this way are bigger than initrds built by dracut. They also have limited functionality: many common types of systems work just fine, but more exotic configurations are not supported.

Bigger and doesn't work in many cases? How perfectly systemd.

I'm sure it will be the default by the time of Fedora 40, and that Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and openSUSE (the "Fedora junior" distros) will scramble to switch to it for fear of falling behind. And immediately all of them will drop support for dracut because "it's just too hard to support two initrd systems", leaving hundreds of millions of working systems in the lurch.

It's called "progress".

[RahulSundaram]

More modern than Dracut? openSUSE switched to Dracut not too long ago, are you saying they switched from an old piece of software to another old one?

The change proposal linked has some details on this. I would recommend reading that. tldr: Dracut runtime scripting is already a thin wrapper around systemd. It makes sense for openSUSE to shift to Dracut for now and then move over to mkiso-initrd later if Fedora makes the transition completely since there is already shared logic that would this easier.

[M@GOid]

MaKe Open Systems Interconnection INITial Ram Disk

What a BRILLIANT acronym

It must be shit name day, because TrenchBoot is also a very bad name. Talk about not knowing history. For those who don't know, wearing boots in water-laden trenches lead to a horrible medical condition known as Trench Foot and the only fix was to remove your Trench Boots and let your feet dry or you'd end up getting your feet amputated.

What's next, replacing BASH with ShellShock?

I advise against using ShellShock. It may leave your machine unresponsive after boot. It also may let to corrupt files down the road.

[skeevy420]

The change proposal linked has some details on this. I would recommend reading that. tldr: Dracut runtime scripting is already a thin wrapper around systemd. It makes sense for openSUSE to shift to Dracut for now and then move over to mkiso-initrd later if Fedora makes the transition completely since there is already shared logic that would this easier.

Do you know how it's going to work in regards to locally compiled software? As far as I can tell, since the plan is to use packages and package managers to install software to the image, which makes a lot of sense, does that mean that anything custom will have to be properly packaged up, placed into a local repository, and pinned for priority instead of lazily installed to $HOME/bin or /usr/local/bin or overwriting package manager software (like the AUR and makepkg and not make && make install)? Will there be, or are there, add or override options for non-repository software?

I assume something like that would be added to the [Content] section of a distro.mkosi based on skimming through Fedora's. The documentation is rather lacking at the moment so skimming config files and the pretty user readable Python was the next best thing.

mkosi.finalize seems to be entirely dependent on RPM at the moment. While I gave it the benefit of the doubt above, is this going to be extended to more than just RPM? There's a lot of implications that can be made about systemd if this stays RPM-only. I imagine the SystemD Brigade will have a field day over that.

[RahulSundaram]

Do you know how it's going to work in regards to locally compiled software? .

I haven't read anything on that specifically.

mkosi.finalize seems to be entirely dependent on RPM at the moment. While I gave it the benefit of the doubt above, is this going to be extended to more than just RPM? There's a lot of implications that can be made about systemd if this stays RPM-only.

mkosi does have support for multiple non RPM using distributions including Arch and Debian. mkosi-initrd seems to be in very early stages and also in a separate repo with basic things like a license file only added a couple of days back. The RPM specific parts you are talking about just runs rpm -ql to gather a list of files for a package, it would be trivial to extend to query other package managers.

[Vistaus]

What's next, replacing BASH with ShellShock?

Fish.