Talk:Custom Initramfs

This article used to be the Initramfs article on the (long gone) gentoo-wiki.com. (It was originally created and written and maintained by me. I relicense my text under the CC-BY-SA license.) I finally found the time to overhaul my article and left out the parts that weren't written by me, in particular anything about modules, systemd, bootsplash, telnet, cmdline et cetera. I don't use any of these things, so if you do, and got it working in your personal Custom Initramfs, feel free to extend this article accordingly. But please try to keep things simple. Thank you... Frostschutz (talk) 23:28, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Isn't there a step missing where you create the sym links to busybox for the various applets? On bumping to busybox-1.23 a lot of people complained that these instructions didn't work and from what I can tell, it was because they hadn't run /bin/busybox --install -s in the chroot. See https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536988. blueenss.


 * Thanks for letting me know. Normally, the `busybox --install -s` should not be necessary. Busybox has an option to use its own applets when there is no binary of that name present. And this option used to be enabled by default in Gentoo. I see this is no longer the case, and also several busybox applets were removed (ar, bbconfig, flash*, mkfs.reiser, tune2fs, uncompress...). There was an issue on the bug tracker a while ago where I commented https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501092#c3 - unfortunately this now seems to have happened, and Gentoo's busybox config is now officially messed up. Frostschutz (talk) 12:58, 22 January 2015 (UTC)


 * This issue was introduced in sys-apps/busybox-1.22.1-r1, which changed `allyesconfig` to `defconfig` for reasons unknown. Changing it back to `allyesconfig` in the busybox-1.23 ebuild fixes the issue. I also found another bug report https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=526008 Frostschutz (talk) 13:26, 22 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Ah, found it: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=525586 - all this for a CONFIG_TFTP_DEBUG=n. Oh well. Frostschutz (talk) 13:43, 22 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Updated the article so it should work regardless. Also added it to the Troubleshooting section so hopefully users running into this issue will stumble over it somehow. I still hope Gentoo will revert this change but it's not my decision to make. Frostschutz (talk) 15:50, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Why "back to you?"
Hi Frostschutz,

I noticed you reverted most of my editing changes to this article. I was curious as to why you reverted the changes. Why "back to you"?

Thanks! --Maffblaster (talk) 18:53, 1 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Previously discussed here. I tried to get used to it but after two months I still think it's horrible, and I don't think I'm the only one. Frostschutz (talk) 20:47, 1 June 2015 (UTC)


 * I was a little surprised to see that, but I'm not going to discuss it further. Things don't always have to be the way I prefer. :) You should continue to improve it! It's a good article. See you around! --Maffblaster (talk) 19:09, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

cryptsetup not prompting for password
I've followed this guide, have the basic bits, devtmpfs, lvm and dm-crypt.

However, cryptsetup never prompts for my password to unlock the key file. There's a point when the boot up appears to hang, but it's just waiting for input as after I type the password in for the key file, it continues on. So, what gives?