Re: initrd redesign (was Re: Partition nightmare Was: Migrating to

Werner Almesberger (almesber@lrc.di.epfl.ch)
Mon, 14 Jun 1999 12:43:00 +0200 (MET DST)


H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> That would be nice, but may complicate things unneccesarily. In the
> general case, you may have to worry about garbage-collecting parts of
> the filesystem that are now unreachable, and that would be majorly
> painful.

My assumption is that all file systems are reachable somehow, e.g. via
some device file. Since you should know fairly well what mess your initrd
may have left behind, the cleanup should actually be quite simple. Even
a "general" cleanup mechanism doesn't look too difficult to me, provided
that you have the access information somewhere (/proc/mount-devs ?).

> I actually think that an nfsroot.gz initrd would do everything the
> current kernel mechanism does.

Yes, and it could even do more clever things than NFS root does right
now. What I meant was that it's trivial to just make a kernel boot
floppy, but constructing something with kernel, nfsroot, and boot loader
is more complex. Naturally, with time, packages and scripts should show
up to simplify this too.

> exec() init works just fine. I have used it. I don't think there is
> any need to put that in kernel space.

Great, so we're already half there :)

- Werner

-- 
  _________________________________________________________________________
 / Werner Almesberger, ICA, EPFL, CH       werner.almesberger@ica.epfl.ch /
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