While I welcome the move to a generic from the huge kernels and the flexibility given by initrd, many folks might forget that moving to an initrd supported kernel also requires changes to the lilo.conf file and the need to keep this initrd file updated during new kernel changes. Things I reminded after 30 years on running on automatic mode and had a kernel panic while booting the new generic, since there was no initrd for this kernel in my lilo.conf file. Luckily, I had the huge kernel as my fallback option, so not a big deal to power cycle this VM one more time.

Kudos to Pat for his due diligence with an updated pkgtool Setup script for mkinitrd, and to provide a README file symlinked inside /boot explaining how things work going forward.

liloconfig, however, still fails to account for the initrd requirement. To improve this, I made a quick patch that check if we are using a generic kernel, and if so, updates the initrd file using Pat's mkinitrd script from pkgtool. Might become a duplicate effort if selected from the Setup option together with liloconfig, but better run it twice than none.

Kudos to the slackpkg tool maintainers for adding a reminder about regenerating a the initrd whenever a new kernel is installed/upgraded, however it does falsely remind even if there is no initrd configured on the lilo.conf file. Perhaps it only checks for the word "initrd", that happens to be present as a comment for the "compat" option, and not at the Linux bootable partition config section.

Thank you for all you do for the community.

Attached Files

liloconfig-mkinitrd.patch.txt (1.9 KB, 34 views)

Patrick recently made a change to the way generic kernels are built. The generic kernels now include support for many file systems by default.

Much to the delight of the uneducated luddite faction on here, an initrd is no longer required to boot a machine with the generic kernel unless you boot from SCSI attached disks or encrypted filesystems (if I've read that right).

It's a small change, but it should cut down a lot of the noise on here.

LILO should see your initrd with the default config.

You might be a bit too late with this, because it seems that LILO is dying. It wouldn't surprise me if GRUB becomes the default boot loader soon. From what I gather, the main reason for this is the lack of maintenance causing LILO to increasingly fail.

EDIT: With all the above said, it is good to see people still caring for these things. Well done. Your effort here is appreciated.

4 members found this post helpful.

Good and fair point. Not a necessity for desktops, but SCSI is a mandatory device at about any server. I personally would love to see, for instance, a "vmware" kernel provided by Slackware team. Since that is not an easy ask (1. way too many things for one Pat alone to handle, 2. that opens a door for folks to also ask for an official Slackware [insert your VM environment here] kernel), and since we can happily live with either the generic+initrd or the huge kernels, those of us running Slackware on virtual environments have to find our ways to keep the ball rolling while life pushes us to do more with less.

LILO does not see an initrd with its default config when updating from huge to generic. Tried that, failed miserably. Hence the code update I shared. Maybe it works on a fresh install and I'm just barking on a tree flagged to be cut down.

Might have limitations/hiccups with bare metal, but I am yet to see one failed on Azure/Oracle Cloud/VMWare/Hyper-V/KVM.

Appreciate the closing words.

A fellow VM user! We're seemingly in the minority here... but Slackware runs very well in VMs. I've had at least one Slackware VM running 24x7 since June 2019. Currently there are 3, all doing different jobs.

Anyhow, here's what I do on ESXi 8.0.0: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...i-8-0-0-38763/

I would love to see a minimal custom-tailored .config for virtualbox!

This was done in VirtualBox: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...machine-38788/

The setup program could create a special initrd if it detects a virtual machine manager. This is what I have in "/etc/mkinitrd.conf" for VM guest whose root image comes from a shared directory from the host:
There might be other modules necessary such as vmw_pvrdma and etc. in special cases.

Anyway, the virtual machine might emulate other devices, so I think the simple solution is to retain only the generic kernel and install all kernel modules into the installation initrd.img.