Jeffrey, This is a nice start at fulfilling a request I made more than a year ago (that Jeremy dismissed): http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-January/msg00901.html On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 04:17:22PM -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote: > > This does increase the memory profile of the initramfs by about 1.5M. > > Isn't that memory freed after the switchroot occurs, though? > > The impression I've gotten is that the memory isn't freed with initramfs > since you can't actually unmount the original rootfs. One is expected to delete files before doing the switchroot. Unlike a ramdisk, the ramfs pages are immediately reclaimed. > > Both of those methods mean you'll be booting to a different kernel than > > the one that is giving you problems. The main reason I rolled this patch > > is to allow you to inspect (and possibly repair) the state of the system > > when you're having problems booting. If you update to a new kernel, and > > that kernel isn't detecting your drives correctly, then that is very > > difficult to troubleshoot once you boot to a rescue kernel. > > If the kernel doesn't detect your drives correctly, then how exactly > does this let you "repair" things? Most problems I've had are long > before the driver is going to screw things up. Potential uses: o Repairing a busted root logical volume (which can happen when snapshotting the root filesystem for example -- been there, done that). o Shrinking filesystems, including the root filesystem. The various resizers only allow for online growth. Having a simple method to create an initramfs image that includes tools plus their load dependencies (pulling in shared libraries, etc.), whatever the size, would be a win. One could decide what is useful locally and put it in a special initramfs image, e.g., /boot/initrd-$KVER-rescue.img With a remote filesystem mount (nfs, cifs, etc.) one could have access to a full set of tools with a simple "mount." Booting with grub is a simple matter of including a stanza for rescue, or editing the initrd line manually at the grub menu. Bill Rugolsky -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
