Test Day:2009-08-27 Dracut

= What to test? =

Today's installment of Fedora Test Day will focus on the nash/mkinitrd replacement; Dracut. This page will outline several methods for enabling dracut on your system, and describe different root device storage scenarios where feedback is needed. Whether you run fedora on a laptop, or on a stateless nfs-mounted remote filesystem ... dracut will be used.

If you come to this page after the test day is completed, your testing is still valuable, and you can use the information on this page to test with your system and provide feedback.

= Who's available =

The following cast of characters will be available testing, workarounds, bug fixes, and general discussion ...
 * Development - Harald Hoyer, Hans de Goede
 * Quality Assurance - James Laska, Jóhann B.

= What's needed to test =


 * A system with some kind of network connection
 * Your hardware profile uploaded to Smolt according to these instructions
 * An installed Fedora distribution, either:
 * Rawhide or the live CD available for this test day (see below).
 * Or an previously installed  system (see [Installation guide)

= How to test? =

Update To Rawhide
See the instructions on the Rawhide page on the various ways in which you can install or update to Rawhide. Alternatively, see below ...

Live Image
Optionally, you may download a non-destructive rawhide live image for your architecture. Tips on using a live image are available at FedoraLiveCD.

Enable Dracut
To test dracut, you will first need to know how to enable dracut support for the distribution you are testing:
 * When testing on Alpha (or rawhide) - QA:Testcase Dracut switch to host-built ramdisk
 * When testing on - QA:Testcase Dracut switch to locally built ramdisk
 * Alternatively, if using the rawhide live image - QA:Testcase_Dracut_live_image

Basic testing
To do a simple test, all you need to do is enable Dracut according to the appropriate test case above, then try and boot your system. Report your result in the results table. To find the root= parameter that was used in your test, run : it will be shown in the result, usually as the second parameter.

Advanced testing
The focus for the dracut test day is to exercise as many different root device partitioning schemas as possible, so if you are confident in your abilities to change the system's partitioning scheme, please try as many variations as possible and report each separately. The following section lists some sample scenarios and provides guidance on creating the partitioning scheme. These tests can be performed on rawhide, Alpha,  or using the provided live image. In all cases, be sure to confirm you are testing with a dracut generated initial ramdisk image.

Report your results
If you have problems with any of the tests, report a bug to Bugzilla usually for the component dracut. If you are unsure about exactly how to file the report, just ask on IRC and we will help you. Once you have completed the tests, add your results to the Results table below, following the example results from the first line as a template.

The first column should be your name with a link to your User page in the Wiki if you have one, and the second should be a link to your Smolt hardware profile (see above for a link with instructions on submitting your hardware profile to Smolt). The next two columns should reflect the test you performed and the result. For example, if you tested dracut support for booting a root device using the file system label, you would enter root=LABEL=foo. If any bugs are encountered, be sure to consult How_to_debug_Dracut_problems for guidance and add a link to the bug report in the References column (as in the example line).

In all cases, the following should be mentioned and attached to your bug report:


 * The exact kernel command-line used. Typically from the bootloader configuration file (e.g. ) or from
 * A copy of your disk partition information from
 * A device listing from device-mapper. This can be obtained by running the command
 * A list of block device attributes including vol_id compatible mode. This can be obtained by running the commands  and
 * If you use a dracut configuration file, please include

= Results =

Issues identified
Use the following table to detail problems discovered or results that don't match expectations.

Things that just work
Hopefully your testing reveals a list of things that work as expected. Please let us know what test scenarios behaved flawlessly.