On 01/16/2009 06:17 PM, Steffen Maier wrote: > On 01/16/2009 02:47 PM, David Cantrell wrote: >> Steffen Maier wrote: >>> On 12/02/2008 07:36 PM, Jeremy Katz wrote: >>>> On Tue, 2008-12-02 at 07:52 -1000, David Cantrell wrote: >> I think we're looking at this the wrong way. Not necessarily init.c >> gaining the capabilities of linuxrc.s390, but loader gaining them when >> appropriate. That's where we do everything else. > > So far, I've been assuming loader requires a curses capable terminal > since it uses newt for its TUI, right? We cannot assume to have such a > terminal on s390. Hence, it is impossible to do interactive pre-inits in > loader. Or did I get something wrong here? > >> Additionally, rawhide might lose init soon as we are working on >> integrating upstart to replace anaconda's special init process. >>>>> Even if we keep the linuxrc.s390 script, >>>>> reducing it to bare minimum and turning things over to the real init >>>>> when we are done are better than what we have now. >>> After digging into F10's init.c (as a more recent/rawhidish version) >>> and finding some code duplicates between init.c and linuxrc.s390, I >>> really like that idea and am willing to give it a try. > [snip] >>> Anyway, the idea is as follows: Reducing code duplicates and thus >>> improving maintenance by doing the common environment initialization >>> in init.c. > [snip] >>> At the point where init.c would fork the loader, we would statically >>> replace this with an #ifdef and instead fork a stripped down >>> linuxrc.s390 which only contains the s390-specific device pre-init >>> including the necessary UI. > [snip] >> I think this is a reasonable thing to try. What I understood so far is: - init shall be platform independent and will be replaced by upstart, and this is the main reason why linuxrc.s390 should no longer be a replacement for init.c - loader should maybe do the s390-specific pre-init of (network) devices - the installer initrd should be built the same way on all platforms What we're trying to achieve is to improve usability of RHEL/Fedora on s390 and due to lack of Rawhide on s390 we implemented this on the basis of RHEL5. Apparently, our code now does not fit in Rawhide. We would like to adapt our code to any suitable interface that Rawhide provides to enable the setup of devices on s390 which used to be done by linuxrc.s390. Could you as the maintainers of the anaconda package please provide such an interface? For planning, I would further like to know until when you think you could provide a prototypical implementation of such interface so I can adapt and test our code to fit in Rawhide? With my latest understanding of your requirements and other constraints, e.g. those of the s390 architecture, I could roughly suggest the following as a basis for a required interface: We need a line mode UI, which must not be part of init/upstart and cannot be part of the loader which uses a newt TUI and needs already preconfigured s390 devices. Therefore, we could call a stripped down version of linuxrc.s390, which I would provide and only does the necessary s390 pre-init, somewhere at the end of init/upstart or before the beginning of the loader. The necessary bash and module-init-tools etc. required by our code are already part of the cross-platform initrd. I think this would fulfill all requirements nicely. Please keep in mind, that we need the functionality to ssh into the installer image in order to start the loader in a curses capable terminal. Since you already mentioned interest in having this for all platforms, there will be general need for a user decision on whether he/she wants to continue installation in the same console session (all other platforms so far) or continue installation by logging in through ssh (s390 so far). This question should appear before our s390 pre-init and obviously needs to take place before loader. It would be nice, if the choice could be handed to our code as a parameter, since there are situations where a text-mode installation from FCP-attached CD/DVD in the same console session on s390 makes sense. If so, we obviously don't need to set up the network during pre-init and users might not even have one when they decide to install from CD/DVD. Steffen Linux on System z Development IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Martin Jetter Geschäftsführung: Erich Baier Sitz der Gesellschaft: Böblingen Registergericht: Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRB 243294 _______________________________________________ Anaconda-devel-list mailing list Anaconda-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/anaconda-devel-list
