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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • If you gonna rant, please make it at least comprehensible. You went from “JS is flawed” to “everyone is wrong these days” within three paragraphs like wth.

    I also highly disagree with your premise that people think ‘simple is bad’. Things that are complicated are usually complicated for a reason. C++ for example is complicated, because it grew over decades. Rust is complicated, because it tries to be secure, capture mistakes at compile time, while allowing for concurrency and memory management, and at the same time be very efficient and give the programmer much control. It’s hard if not impossible to achieve all these goals in a language without making it complicated.

    Go on the other hand is not complicated, because Google engineers saw C++ and wanted to make something less complicated - and thus they created a simpler language. This is an example that goes directly against your argument, together with many other modern languages and frameworks that were created for reasons like this. But notably and more importantly, the most popular languages are simple. Python, JS/TS, Java - These languages are all relatively easy to use.

    I won’t pretend that I get you bit about WASM since I have little experience with it, but as far as I understand it is primarily a vehicle allowing to use programming languages for the web that weren’t designed for it. And as far as I’m aware you can do quite sophisticated things with it, so where exactly is the problem? Putting guardrails in place is rarely a bad thing, because they are easy to remove but hard to establish retroactively.









  • In the case of Dracut, I’m not sure what it does exactly, but the kernels will almost definitely not be identical. In the “EFI kernel”, uneeded modules (meaning most of them) are usually omitted.

    You could probably also have different kernels in terms of version number, although it might complicate things. Kinda depends on whether they recycle data structures from the first kernel and whether those remain compatible. I don’t really know whether this is actually done tho.

    The reason why multiple kernels (or bootloaders for that matter) are used is that there are different levels of “readiness” in your system. Say you have LVM and a LUKS encrypted partition (in whatever order). Systemctl-boot will load the kernel and it’s initramfs, but can’t be bothered to deal with complicated file system shenanigans. That would complicate the whole program significantly.

    So it just loads a Linux kernel which has these capabilities. That kernel can deal with LVM, decrypt the LUKS partition (or ask for a password), mount whatever btrfs nonsense is inside and then hand it over to the proper kernel. The proper kernel can in turn rely on having all its stuff mounted and ready, instead of having to worry about all this.

    You could do with just one kernel, but Dracut allows you to rapidly create bootable kernel + initramfs pairs of which you might need multiple (e.g. for dual booting, backup). Moreover, you probably wouldn’t really want it to fiddle with your kernel all the time, especially when it’s customised already.


  • The kernel in the EFI partition is used as a tool to bootstrap hardware and memory for your proper kernel, which is chainloaded.

    There is a simple reason for that: The Linux kernel can do anything a bootloader needs to do, especially for itself, so why not use it as one?

    That said, in most setups there is another bootloader before that, which loads the kernel itself and the initramfs for that kernel. That can be for example systemd-boot, formerly known gummiboot, a minimal bootloader meant to (auto-)discover EFI compatible stuff it can load.

    Dracut creates a setup / boot chain like that.