On Fri, 2004-05-28 at 18:05 +0200, Thomas Woerner wrote:
There are test packages in http://people.redhat.com/twoerner/UDEV/ for using udev in initrd with persistent devices.
Note, all of my comments here are just from looking at the changes and not actually trying them yet. I'll try to get to that later tonight, though.
Have you tried it out, yet? :-)
Thus the new mkinitrd is using busybox for the initrd with udev support. Disabling udev results in a normal initrd with nash. It is easy to modify mkinitrd to build the normal initrd with busybox.
Hmmm, this uglifies mkinitrd a lot. Having two completely separate paths for the initrd is completely unmaintainable for the long-term. I think that I'd rather cut the busybox down to just the minimal set of tools needed and then still use nash as the base shell. And actually, getting it so that we're using the main busybox instead of busybox-initrd would be nice (I need to look at the anaconda specific config differences so that I can try to merge those to not require a weird subpackage). This would be especially as there are a few "features" in nash that aren't going to be in a standard shell (things like handling of quiet mode, the simple mkdmnod present, etc)
This is a test package. I patched mkinitrd to use busybox for udev support only, the non-udev version is the working fallback for the user.
nash is not needed anymore with busybox::ash and busybox::linuxrc. Why using and maintaining an own tool if there is nearly the same in busybox, already?
udev initrd - using busybox and ramfs ------------------------------------- 1) mount /proc and /sys 2) mount /dev as ramfs 3) create initial devices (eg: console, null, zero, loopX) and links for std files
This looks/feels a little ugly. But there's probably some shell that could make it a little bit cleaner.
Why not make this transparent for the user? It is not useful to hide this information - it is not a secret.
4) start udev, use udevsend as hotplug 5) load modules (eg. controller, filesystem) 6) umount /sys 7) locate root device
I don't like this at all. For one thing, doesn't it currently break with root=LABEL=/? Is there a reason not to just use /dev/root here as we currently do?
/dev/root might be nice to look at, but it is not necessary and transparent at all. The real boot device is available and can be used directly. LABEL=X is also supported in the busybox::mount test version.
Thomas
-- Thomas Woerner, Software Developer Phone: +49-711-96437-0 Red Hat GmbH Fax : +49-711-96437-111 Hauptstaetterstr. 58 Email: twoerner@xxxxxxxxxx D-70178 Stuttgart Web : http://www.redhat.de/
