Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
For hard numbers, I'll look at two Debian 8 systemd systems I have in front of me: a shell server and a locked-down diskless GUI kiosk.
Basic Debian 8 install, w/o GUI, w/ NFS client, w/ ISC NTP client:
root@zygon:~# systemctl list-units | wc -l 89 root@zygon:~# systemctl list-unit-files | wc -l 208
Goodness, that certainly is a lot. The linuxmafia.com server box sending this message has 22 services it starts up, though that includes a few things that aren't really services. sysklogd klogd bind9 ssh spamassassin exim4 hotkey-setup mailman mysql netdiag rsync sysstat vsftpd ntp mdadm bootlogs atd cron apache2 rc.local rmnologin stop-bootlogd My Debian desktop systems (typically Window Maker with no DE) tend to have fewer. Anyhow, all I was basically saying that if I had to tweak custom runit (for example) plumbing for 22 local services, that would be no big deal for me.
i.e. to fully support a new init system on Debian, you need to write around a thousand services.
Well, above illustrates why I think otherwise. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not sure how.
I trust you already know about make localmodconfig / localyesconfig and LSMOD=./lsmod-otherhost-stdout.txt
I've tried this in the past and it mostly works.
I read articles about this, and it definitely kicks derriere.
The main reason to keep an initrd around in such cases is when the root filesystem is on an LUKS or RAID or btrfs or zfs.
I'll definitely have the root FS on RAID1, but I'm pretty sure I'll have no problem with getting to that from maintenance media -- but I'll check and make sure.
Strongly recommend you check out busybox mdev, then. I've had good reports from a couple of friends with, um, similar temperaments to yours :-)
Yeah, strongly leaning towards that or static dev.
Ah yeah purely static /dev should be about as good, for you.
IIRC mdev is mainly about letting the kernel auto-create devices in /dev (devfs?) and then mdev just loosening the permissions, e.g. "chgrp -h audio /dev/snd/*".
If yours is literally static (& persistent), and the kernel isn't creating new devices, you can probably just do that by hand.
mknod and kin still work!
Thank you, I enjoyed that anecdote immensely :-)
I had the feeling I was hearing a 'witnessing'.