suggestion: rescue boot extension

[Jon Masters]

On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 21:22 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 02, 2010 at 03:13:21PM -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote:

> > Is it better to have a separate volume for this, or to just have a sort
> > of rescue initramfs ...?
> 
> Or if you are able to run a little bit of C code[1] and can read files
> from the root partition (as grub can), you can build one on the fly
> using binaries, libraries etc found on the root disk, which is what we
> do in libguestfs.

I specifically think this is not the solution :) It's great for
libguestfs, but the idea here is to have known-good binaries that can be
used to recover a system - and that change very rarely indeed (on the
same order as the "physical" media containing the installer) - when it
is broken during an update or otherwise. If the system is already
busticated, then building images from it will not help.

A recovery initramfs could be used. It could just basically be the
rescue mode anaconda bits in one image shoved in place to start.

Jon.