I have no particular attachment to boottool; despite the name it looks like grubby supports a lot of different bootloaders (all the ones boottool does, anyway) so if it can support all the existing behaviors then I'm all for it.
My big concern would be how it's supposed to be distributed; boottool can just be bundled into Autotest as a script and installed on test machines along with the client, but how would this work with grubby? -- John On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 8:15 PM, Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues <[email protected]>wrote: > Hi folks, > > I've been playing with the features to install kernels during > client/server side jobs, and I've noticed some problems with boottool on > Fedora/RHEL systems. I figured it'd be best to write asking for some > advice, maybe I am doing something wrong here. > > 1) Boottool can't set a particular entry to boot once - once we call > methods on the job.kernel object, such as > > k = job.kernel(... > > k.boot() > > This translates to boottool executing the following commands: > > ... > 10/05 22:56:16 DEBUG| utils:0073| Running > '/usr/local/autotest/tools/boottool "--remove-kernel=autotest"' > 10/05 22:56:17 DEBUG| utils:0073| Running > '/usr/local/autotest/tools/boottool "--info=all"' > 10/05 22:56:17 DEBUG| utils:0073| Running > '/usr/local/autotest/tools/boottool > "--add-kernel=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.36-0.32.rc6.git2.fc15.x86_64" > "--title=autotest" "--args=IDENT=1286333776" "--position=end"' > ... > 10/05 22:56:17 DEBUG| utils:0073| Running > '/usr/local/autotest/tools/boottool "--boot-once" "--title=autotest"' > > The program fails to make the next boot to use the newly created entry. > > 2) Boottool can't copy kernel arguments vital to boot: Most RHEL and > Fedora systems use lvm, so the command line for fedora looks like: > > title Fedora (2.6.36-0.32.rc6.git2.fc15.x86_64) > root (hd0,0) > kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.36-0.32.rc6.git2.fc15.x86_64 ro > root=/dev/mapper/vg_virtlab15-lv_root rd_LVM_LV=vg_virtlab15/lv_root > rd_LVM_LV=vg_virtlab15/lv_swap rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYTABLE=us rhgb quiet > > The entry generated by boottool looks like > > title autotest > root (hd0,0) > kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.36-0.32.rc6.git2.fc15.x86_64 > root=/dev/mapper/vg_virtlab15-lv_root IDENT=1286333776 > savedefault > > So even if the flag --boot-once worked, it would cause a kernel panic > (unable to boot since /dev/mapper/vg_* is unknown). Questions: > > * Has anyone found similar problems? I can only assume it's working well > for the systems you guys use routinely > * There's a tool called grubby, similar in purpose to boottool, that is > very popular for red hat based systems, that could be used as an > optional backend for boottool. In your opinion, is it better to try to > fix boottool or use grubby? > >
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