[Patch v4 3/6] pass mount info to dracut when default target is a separate disk

[Martin Milata]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 12:51:37 -0400, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 02:01:15PM +0100, Martin Milata wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > do I understand it correctly that kdump will be able to automatically
> > mount the filesystem(s) needed to access "path" if no partition is
> > specified?
> 
> Martin,
> 
> We will still expect target to be mounted in first kernel. Just that
> one should be able to only specify path and it is not mandatory to
> specify disk too. 
> 
> For example, say you have mounted a disk /dev/sdb on /mnt/foo. And say 
> you wanted dump to be saved in foo1 directory on disk sdb.
> 
> So far one will have to say following in /etc/kdump.conf to achive above.
> 
> ext4 /dev/sdb
> path /foo1
> 
> Now one should be able to achieve same goal by specifying.
> 
> path /mnt/foo/foo1
> 
> Kdump script will recognize that a disk is mounted on /mnt/foo and
> internally it will come up with target=/dev/sdb and path=/foo1.
> 
> So something which had to be done explicitly by user and now also
> be done by kdump script. User just has to pass full path of where dump
> needs to be saved.

> > With regards to s-c-kdump, would it be sufficient to enable setting the
> > "Path" textbox even when no partition is chosen in the "Partition" drop
> > down menu?
> 
> I think so. After this change, one should be able to change path even if
> target is not specified. Some kind of error checking would be good though
> to make sure path specified by user does exist.

Nice, thanks for the explanation. I'm wondering whether s-c-kdump needs
to know if the current kexec-tools support this feature. If we simply
allow the path to be supplied regardless of kexec-tools version, the
worst that can happen is that kdump.conf is generated which causes (an
old version of) kdump to save the dump on root fs in the specified
directory. Is that acceptable?

> > Does the path need some addition validation?
> 
> We just need to make sure path exists.
> 
> > 
> > Is this change targeted at RHEL6/RHEL7/Fedora?
> 
> This is fedora specific list so let us limit discussion to fedora only. We
> want to make this change in fedora because people have separate disk
> mounted in on /var and they expect dump to show up there automatically.
> 
> I think it will also make the configuraiton easier. 

Ah, sorry, should have looked at the name of the list.

Martin