Comment by Dylan16807
5 days ago
Yes of course it can break. The point is that the stuff needs to be in initramfs. "includes everything" has an implicit "when working".
What seems bad about it to you? Initrd means you only need /boot (or equivalent) to be working at boot time, which seems nice to me. And looking at mine, the image is smaller than the kernel, so it's not wasting a ton of space.
More than once I've run into weird issues with missing filesystem drivers and other important things that caused me major grief during an emergency.
Sure it could be blamed on shitty distro maintenance and development but a better architecture would be putting essential things like filesystem drivers in /boot without this extra kludge of rebuilding an initrd (that you hopefully didn't forget to do before typing reboot) which depends on a pile of config files set just right (and oh by the way different in literally every distro).
A folder in boot could still be missing drivers, though.
Rebuilding an image isn't a big factor there, it's a tradeoff between making setup a bit more annoying versus making it a bit easier to manage your boot files.