suggestion: rescue boot extension

Eric Sandeen sandeen at redhat.com
Wed Jun 2 20:39:12 UTC 2010


Jon Masters wrote:
> 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.

Totally depends on how it got busted.

Certainly you would not want to automatically update the rescue with
each new rpm install; that'd be foolish.

And I think the converse is very possible - "crap, my root filesystem
is corrupted but this old e2fsck won't fix it.  I know the fix is
in newer packages but it's not in my rescue image!  Argh!"

Or, maybe you want some new tool that isn't in the default set.

The ability to create/update a rescue image would be very useful IMHO.

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

This makes sense to me as a pretty simple solution to get going with.

-Eric

> Jon.
> 
> 



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