Gentoo LiveUSB Feedback

[ilyaigpetrov]

Hi, @desultory!

Today I decided to try your ugrd on a new Gentoo install from a live usb.
Here is some feedback:

1. During the install I chroot into my new Gentoo setup. The kernel inside it is 6.18.18 but uname -a still shows 6.19.11 of the live usb kernel I use. Due to this discrepancy ugrd fails with CRITICAL | Kernel module directory does not exist for kernel: 6.19.11-gentoo-dist. I solved the problem by specifying kernel version in the config just for the first install of ugrd.
2. I failed to install (emerge) ugrd after the first several attempts because my chroot had no cryptsetup and btrfs tools available. Maybe you can add use flags (btrfs and luks) which being enabled in the make.conf would install the dependencies in one emerge run.

Thank you for your work,
Ilya.

[desultory]

1. that is typically handled by instlalkernel. If you're using a custom kernel, that is run when you run make install in the source dir. Setting the kver in the config works, but that means it will keep targeting an old kernel version unless you manually update that. You can pass --kver if running ugrd manually, and it should complete the names from /lib/modules if you use bash or zsh as your shell

2. unfortunately these don't really make sense as USE flags. there are postinstall messages and I'm thinking of ways to better warn users about missing binaries, maybe even some way for modules to have custom error messages if loading fails (like what happens when the module is loaded and those binaries are missing)
   in the case of cryptsetup, this is very important, for btrfs, there is a toggle to make it not pull userspace tools. It's generally best to just let it do that, and is absolutely necessary if you're using btrfs RAID, and i think for udev support (helpful if you have a systemd profile)