On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 02:20:10PM -0500, Jeremy Katz wrote:
If someone were to start looking at it, we could probably even get
some
simple stuff done for F7 since we're not talking about huge amounts of
stuff. Also, once we have the basics, we can think about things like
integrating the functionality into the live CD as well.
The last time this came up, IIRC, was Jeff Layton's mkinitrd rescue mode
patch. I haven't looked at anaconda since then, so I have no idea where
things were taken for FC6+.
My firm is currently rolling our own initramfs that we use for PXE
installs, as well as providing a ramfs-based rescue mode. I've encouraged
my colleague to package this as a mkinitrd replacement that might be more
generally useful.
As I mentioned last go-round, GRUB (and perhaps the other boot loaders)
can load multiple initramfs payloads. That means that one can have
a small standard *kernel-independent* payload, a kernel-dependent payload
(modules, probably udev at the rate we are going :-|),
perhaps an install-specific image (e.g., localization info -- fonts,
keyboard maps), and a large, static rescue payload.
With suitable hooks in the standard payloads to test for the existence
of various files (just like /fastboot, /forcefsck, etc.), task-specific
initramfs payloads could be dropped into /boot and do their bit automatically.
E.g., one of the things that we are doing is failing out and doing an
upgrade on half of a RAID1; if the upgrade fails, we boot back into the old
image. Another oft-requested task is running parted to move partitions
around.
Regards,
Bill Rugolsky