On 08:29, Nix wrote: > > I'm using a similar setup since December or so with no problems so > > far. However, all my systems have initramfs as their rootfs. > > (well, technically, *every* 2.6 system has an initramfs unpacked into > its rootfs: it's just that for most people it's empty.) What I meant is that it never gets overmounted by a real rootfs. > There *is* a limit (depending on the size of the statically-populated > page tables); right now I think it's 32Mb on i386/x86_64. Look out. Care to explain a bit further? Are these statically-populated page tables only used at boot time? I always thought an N MB initramfs cuts about N MB of the main memory, plus some housekeeping data, but that's all. This view is probably a little bit too naive ;) > ifconfig? route? ick. ip(8) is the wave of the future :) far more flexible > and actually has a comprehensible command line as well. Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try. > I try to avoid running daemons out of initramfs, because all those daemons > share *no* inodes with anything else you'll ever run: more permanent memory > load for as long as those daemons are running, although at least it's > swappable load. Fair enough, but portmap is needed to mount NFS filesystems. How much memory would be saved if I'd kill portmap after the mount and restart it afterwards from a mounted filesystem? > > The following works pretty well for me: > > > > echo "DEVICE /dev/hd*[0-9] /dev/sd*[0-9] /dev/md[0-9]" > /etc/mdadm.conf > > mdadm --examine --scan --config=/etc/mdadm.conf >> /etc/mdadm.conf > > mdadm --assemble --scan > > Yeah, that would work. Neil's very *emphatic* about hardwiring the UUIDs of > your arrays, though I'll admit that given the existence of --examine --scan, > I don't really see why. :) He likes to compare the situation with /etc/fstab. Nobody complains about having to edit /etc/fstab, so why keep people complaining about having to edit /etc/mdadm.conf? > >> /sbin/mdev -s > > > > What's mdev? udevstart works too, but it seems to be depreciated now. > > mdev is `micro-udev', a 255-line tiny replacement for udev. It's part of > busybox. Cool. Guess I'll have to update busybox.. > > Minor suggestion: > > > > if test -e /proc/mdstat; then /sbin/mdadm ... > > Pointless, really: if /proc fails to mount we're dead anyway It's not about /proc, it's about /proc/mdstat. If the machine does not have raid, there won't be a /proc/mdstat. > I can be *sure* that RAID was built into this kernel > because the initramfs is linked into the kernel image :) OK. But then you'll need different init scripts for different setups. > Binary sizes: > > -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 248580 Mar 12 17:15 bin/busybox > -r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 512693 Mar 5 17:53 sbin/lvm > -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 173349 Mar 5 16:50 sbin/mdadm That's indeed much smaller than what I have (6 MB). However, what I like about using glibc is that there is no need to have different versions of these tools. If I install a new mdadm, the next kernel's initramfs will automatically contain the new version. Moreover, one can add another binary to the initramfs simply by putting one more line to a text file. Thanks Andre -- The only person who always got his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
