Non static busybox for initramfs

[Xander314]

I followed the Gentoo wiki's guide for early userspace mounting so I can mount my separate /usr partition before udev starts. However, I have one question. The article says to enable the static use flag for busybox. Now, this disables PAM support, and apparently we shouldn't "randomly flip" the pam use flag. Therefore, I decided to compile busybox without the static use flag, and just provide the extra 3 shared libraries linked against it to the initramfs.

So is this okay, or is there some good reason for compiling static busybox instead?

[greyspoke]

I can't really comment on whether its OK or not (if it works, it works...). But when I faced this problem building my initramfs I downloaded the BusyBox source and built one from that in my home directory (just configure and make, don't install). You can configure it with just enough functions for your initramfs to work (comes out around 1 MB for me) or to include the kitchen sink for a rescue shell (> 2 MB). It has a menu configurator which is a bit flakey but worked OK for me.

Then again, my gentoo-installed /bin/busybox has no hard links to it so doesn't appear to be used for anything (I think it used to be used for some basic stuff in /bin and so on). Possibly it is needed for genkernel, which builds initramfs's I beleive (I don't use genkernel). Judging by the size of the BusyBox in my /bin directory (< 1 MB), it is not being built with a full house of functionality.