Hi all, I need to add support to dracut for live (squashfs) root with a "state" saved on nfs server. I imagine following use case - * initramfs includes ext3 filesystem wrapped into squashfs (like ovirt-node-image has) * that filesystem is used as a live root (initramfs is pulled from TFTP) * kernel cmdline has CLIENTSTATE variable set to address of NFS mount. Then rc.sysinit will mount $CLIENTSTATE/$HOSTNAME (as a last resort case) and will use it as a STATE_MOUNT. Thus, we have read-only root in RAM and all state files mounted from NFS. So server can operate totally diskless (opposed to ovirt-node which has to be set-up on a local disk or iSCSI target, both of which seem to be an overkill if one has 16+ servers). An adding new servers to a pool requires only correct DHCP server settings, nothing more (probably some files on a nfs server too, but that's another story). What I need from dracut is to set up networking and pass ifcfg's to a system via /dev/.initramfs. But then I need to some-how "simulate" networked root because otherwise there is no chance to bring network up. STATE_MOUNT is mounted very early, no system networking is set up yet, only what initramfs provided. And my idea is to setup bond+bridge so it could be very tricky to make initscripts do it on a read-only root (shared between systems) in a right way anyways - I prefer to specify what interface is what by its macaddr, but this seems to be impossible if I boot multiple systems from one image. I assume it could be possible to achieve what I need with a little "hack" - introduce new netroot handler - f.e. 'nfs-state' or 'live-nfs' or whatever else (this is btw the biggest problem - to find proper name) and try to pass "netroot=nfs-state root=live:blablabla CLIENTSTATE=xxx.yyy.zzz.www:/mnt" via cmdline. If this fail (f.e. if netroot is over-riden somewhere) I'll probably need to patch all networking code to make it run not only if netroot is set but also if both "root=live" and "CLIENTSTATE" are set. I generally do not like this way very much, so I'm asking for help with this. Could someone comment please? Any thoughts are welcome. Best, Vladislav -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe initramfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
