caleb on Nostr: Had actually a lot of fun hacking on this. The initramfs used to always find and ...
Had actually a lot of fun hacking on this. The initramfs used to always find and extract an extra archive which contained additional binaries (e.g. unl0kr) which didn't fit on some older devices.
The new approach is to split the initramfs into a first and second stage. On the majority of devices both stages are immediately available so we jump straight to stage 2. But on those with super constrained boot partitions (some old Android and Chromebooks mostly), the second stage has to be loaded from the pmOS_boot partition and then it can be jumped to.
This way, once we're in the second stage we can assume that everything is available and we don't need to introduce a bunch of runtime checks.
Huge thanks to npub1exk5aw3edm004skcy0j72hgkhva4s6sy93hxrpqujh4dul02zlmq4vx7we (npub1exk…x7we) for getting folks to help with testing and getting this finally merged! And to Clayton and npub1ka8l98ma485d4axjqsg9j2swv3r9jehfk038xalfjku05a8znf6srjd9qd (npub1ka8…d9qd) for talking through the ideas at all systems go :D
The new approach is to split the initramfs into a first and second stage. On the majority of devices both stages are immediately available so we jump straight to stage 2. But on those with super constrained boot partitions (some old Android and Chromebooks mostly), the second stage has to be loaded from the pmOS_boot partition and then it can be jumped to.
This way, once we're in the second stage we can assume that everything is available and we don't need to introduce a bunch of runtime checks.
Huge thanks to npub1exk5aw3edm004skcy0j72hgkhva4s6sy93hxrpqujh4dul02zlmq4vx7we (npub1exk…x7we) for getting folks to help with testing and getting this finally merged! And to Clayton and npub1ka8l98ma485d4axjqsg9j2swv3r9jehfk038xalfjku05a8znf6srjd9qd (npub1ka8…d9qd) for talking through the ideas at all systems go :D
quoting note1f8w…5tl5We just shipped some major refactoring in our initramfs, removing some of the oldest tech-debt in the distro and finally making it possible to boot without first finding and unpacking the "initramfs-extra" archive!
This new unified-initramfs behaviour is now the default for most devices, and may lead to a slight boottime speedup!
https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/5636
We're hopeful this doesn't break anything, but if you do run into issues please go check out the tracking thread here https://postmarketos.org/edge/2024/10/31/Recent-changes-might-affect-booting/