[Fedora-livecd-list] Re: Seemingly divergent netboot/disklessrc and livecd/mayflower for initrd, init, etc...

[Bryan J Smith]

On Thu, 2008-10-16 at 10:41 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Not sure what you mean by 'a modification'. The support *is there
> in the stock initrd in RHEL 5*.

Support is there, yes.  But for diskless to work, or should I say, as
system-config-netboot modifies, it adds modules, a flexible disklessrc
init and related support files.

Again, it was my mistake to refer to this as an "initrd" modification.
I guess what I'm talking about is a replacement "mayflower" that does
many other things.

> Correct. It was a side effect of porting the installer to udev.

Which leaves me with older developments, Rahul's modification of an
older LiveCD/mayflower, etc...

> What specific features do you need?

As my original post, a single toolset build around Anaconda
install-to-disk, like LiveCD/mayflower, but for RHEL 5 today (will adapt
to newer Fedora developments for a future RHEL 6 when I have more
time) ...

- Can generate a Diskless initrd (disklessrc init, various network)
- Can generate a ISO initrd (like mayflower's init, various fs/etc...)
- Can generate a Disk initrd (more than just squashfs?  new init)
- Can generate a "Super" initrd (take various boot init= options)

Additionally, I was going to add the following options in the new "Disk"
initrd init (think flash/embedded):  

- Option to compare image checksums to TFTP server, update if different
- Option to boot diskless if local boot fails (trap failures/set flag)



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Bryan J Smith - Senior Consultant - Red Hat GPS SE US
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