[PATCH] mkinitrd rescue mode

[Jeffrey Layton]

On Thu, 2005-06-02 at 11:23 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> This will have a relatively significant impact on the size of the
> initramfs and thus on the memory profile.  Although I see it's not
> enabled by default, which is at least a plus  It also won't handle
> filesystems other than ext3.
> 

This is just a proof-of-concept sort of thing at this stage. A better
patch would detect the filesystem type of / and copy the fsck for that
partition here. Then if you had other filesystems you could mount / and
use those.

This does increase the memory profile of the initramfs by about 1.5M.
Isn't that memory freed after the switchroot occurs, though?

It's not enabled by default in this incarnation, but my preference would
be that it is in a later one.

> > This gives you some ability to troubleshoot booting problems, and gives
> > the ability to do some rescue-type work without having to boot to the
> > CD. This is a big plus for people that run boxes remotely and don't have
> > easy physical access to them.
> 
> PXE, copying the pxeboot vmlinuz/initrd into your grub.conf and a few
> other things can give you a way to boot rescue mode without having to
> put in a CD.  If you're having to run mkinitrd with different command
> line arguments, then you've already lost if you've really hosed your
> system badly.
> 
> Honestly, I'd really rather see improvements to rescue mode than
> something like this.

Both of those methods mean you'll be booting to a different kernel than
the one that is giving you problems. The main reason I rolled this patch
is to allow you to inspect (and possibly repair) the state of the system
when you're having problems booting. If you update to a new kernel, and
that kernel isn't detecting your drives correctly, then that is very
difficult to troubleshoot once you boot to a rescue kernel.

-- 
Jeffrey Layton <jlayton at redhat.com>