Proposed F19 Feature: Dracut HostOnly

[John Reiser]

On 01/30/2013 02:07 PM, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Miloslav Trmač (mitr at volny.cz) said: 

>> Teach grub to preload the kernel and initrd while waiting for the
>> timeout.  That gives us _even better_ speedup, and doesn't sacrifice
>> the generic usability of the initrd.

> Well, if the plan is to not timeout, that won't help. But it could be
> interesting. Although, everything I've heard about the grub code makes
> me entirely concerned when something that amounts to 'introduce threads'
> is suggested.

Threads are not needed and not desired; the analog of SIGALRM works fine
single-threaded.

The problem is the possibility of I/O errors when reading ahead.
Recovery from an I/O error can take a very long time, and may be
not interruptable.  For instance, the linux kernel can take _minutes_
to recover from CD/DVD errors, and grub might be no better.
If read-ahead (after no wait) on the default choice "always" runs into
trouble, then selecting some other choice might be impossible.

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