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Has anyone tried booster to replace mkinitcpio? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 9 months ago by Certainity45@lemmy.ml to c/archlinux@lemmy.ml

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https://github.com/anatol/booster

Does this give any real world value for boot times or anything else?

I have no possibility to test this in VM so that's why I'm asking if anybody has actually tried this and found benefits.

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[–] kixik@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm wondering how both mkinitcpio alternatives work on non systemd boxes with full disk encryption. With both, I refer to dracut and booster. On its origins I believe dracut was pretty tight involved with systemd, and booster is developed/maintained by an arch developer/user if not mistaken, and arch supposes systemd, though none of those things actually mean non systemd boxes are not supported.

I'm also wondering if the initrds generated can be launched by grub (I do /boot partition encryption/decryption with grub), and I also do / full partition encryption with luks. This booster issue sort of indicates as of now booster initrd images can't be loaded by grub...

[–] patatahooligan@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Grub can load booster images, the issue is about incorrect grub.cfg generation.

What they're saying in the issue is that grub-mkconfig will not create a correct "Arch Linux" menu entry for booster, but if you go to "Advanced options" and choose the "booster" menu entry it works. I can confirm this. It happened on the system I'm currently using.

Specifically, the problem is that grub-mkconfig does not add the booster image to the initrd of the default menu entry. You can add it manually. For example I had to change this

initrd  /intel-ucode.img

to this

initrd  /intel-ucode.img /booster-linux-zen.img

If I recall correctly this issue was not present last time I set up a system with booster. It might be a regression or maybe it only happens in specific system configurations.

[–] kixik@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago

understood, so no big issue with grub, cool !