On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 5:36 PM, C Anthony Risinger <anthony@xxxxxxx> wrote: > 2011/6/9 Joe(theWordy)Philbrook <jtwdyp@xxxxxxxx>: >> >> This is the kind of thing that caused me to become a ‘multi-Linux distribution’, >> ‘multi-boot’ kind of guy in the first place. When an upgrade «or my own >> dumb mistakes» break my system I like being able to simply reboot something >> else and finish anything I'm working on before I spend hours, or days, or >> even weeks just trying to figure out what broke... >> >> It's not likely that anything other than a hardware failure will shut down >> Arch AND Ubuntu AND PCLinuxOS AND OpenSuSE all at the same time... And for >> that I still have a laptop... >> >> But it would sure be nice to be able to keep using my favorite distro with >> a fallback kernel instead of having to boot one of the others. But I do >> have to agree that more than one fully functional old kernel is a bad >> idea. Though I don't have much trouble manually deleting the really old ones >> from Ubuntu's /boot dir... > > what if we (optionally) stored the original images _inside_ the new > one? the new/bad kernel would boot, and via some bootloader entry eg. > kernel param the new initcpio script would kexec the old kernel, with > another (different) kernel param ... when the old kernel booted it > would load the exact same initramfs image, except it would use an > alternate tree, ie. instead of /init it would chroot to /previous and > run /previous/init ... > > you could store as many of these "old" images as you liked, but it > would look like one -- i don't see any technical problems off-hand at > least, and i *think* it would only require minor changes to > mkinitcpio, and would be unobtrusive to other tools. > > does this sound genius or completely insane? some insanely genius guy > once said they are only separated by a fine line ... oops, forgot to mention one caveat -- if the new kernel was totally borked and didn't boot at *all* and couldnt even get to the initramfs, then it wouldn't work ... but i dont think thats ever happened to me and seems pretty rare. C Anthony
