suggestion: rescue boot extension

[Jon Masters]

On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 15:39 -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> 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.

Yea, but why rebuild it unless you need to? I'm talking about being able
to boot into a rescue environment. I don't really care which version of
KDE/GNOME is available, only that some major change to Fedora is picked
up in time. For example if this was around the time LUKS support was
added, it would be useful to have that, but then such a major item would
line up with a new Fedora release anyway and have Anaconda dependencies.

I know Fedora is all about fast pace, but this is one time where it's a
good idea not to move quickly :) And frankly, even Windows has a "Safe
Mode" that often works to boot into a recovery environment.

> > 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.

Ok. When I get a minute, I'll write this up and suggest that as a
starting point to get something vaguely useful.

Jon.