Hi, I've been looking into writing the necessary code to support doing root on NBD. After reading initramfs-tools(8), I think I understand that there will be no networking unless the system is configured for an NFS root setup.
One way to work around that problem would be to trick initramfs-tools' 'init' script into believing that we're trying to do an NFS mount, only to change the world from under it at the very last moment and to tell it that we're actually going to do a somewhat local mount, triggering the regular "local" block device handling in the process. Since that sounds incredibly ugly, I think it's probably best if I just make sure that the configure_networking function from /scripts/functions is called from my nbd boot script, which should be in local-top. This is much cleaner, but there are still some minor issues: - configure_networking needs IPOPTS to be set, which is not exported into the environment. Re-parsing the commandline from my boot script to make sure IPOPTS is set would obviously work, but that seems somewhat brittle. Would it make sense to export this variable from /init, so that my boot script can call it if necessary? - I would need to somehow set the server we're connecting to, and the port on which we're trying to connect to that server; it seems to me that the best way to do this is to create more commandline variables; I suggest "nbdsrv=" for the server, and "nbdport=" for the port. Perhaps you might want to add those to your documentation (once the support is actually there, that is) - It would appear that currently, if you want to figure out whether something uses a specific block device (or even a block device of which the name matches a regular expression) under some layers of lvm or other device-mapper trickery, you need to script that on your own. Is this true? If not, what function should I be calling? If so, wouldn't it be interesting to add such a function? Comments? Thanks, -- <Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes. -- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
