dermotbradley
commented
2 years ago Hi. To be honest I have not looked at updating this patch - my attempt to get it merged into Alpine's mkinitfs failed (at least for the present).
The problem with relying on a patched package of mkinitfs is that any time Alpine publish a new mkinitfs package (whether a new version or just a patch release) then if your system updates to that new package then things are likely to break (a new initramfs may be automatically built without these changes).
Recent Alpine kernels have compresses kernel modules and also use simpledrm instead of framebuffer drivers - perhaps this is related to your problems. I expect that you need to modify the /etc/mkinitfs/features.d/.modules files so then entries end in ".ko" rather than ".ko" and rebuild the initramfs, otherwise kernel modules will not be placed in the initramfs.
However, once again, I'll warn that using a patched mkinitfs is likely to cause issues as time goes on.
Boteium
apparently, mkinitfs 3.6 (from official repo) is required to make a bootable initramfs after upgrading the whole system today.
I do have an old linux-lts 5.10.51 backup kernel and I did a quick test. This version of mkinitfs 3.5 is producing working initramfs with the older kernel, but not the newer one. It's unclear if this problem is related to kernel or not because all other system components are updated. Maybe simply updating this patched version of mkinitfs to 3.6 would fix everything but I didn't test this theory.