-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: RIPEMD160 Not sure how many people read lfs-book, but Alexander brought up an issue with LFS in bug #2033. Upstream (by which I mean the kernel devs) say that basically any system needs to have support for an initramfs for several kernel-supported setups to work right. The problem in question there had to do with having a root FS on LVM, but there are other cases where it's needed too.
I did some work over the weekend on a basic mkinitramfs script, so we'd have a semi-supported way for users to create an initramfs (which can then be modified if our default one doesn't support their setup). I set up an svn repo at https://svn.kdzbn.homelinux.net/svn/lfs-initramfs/ with the PoC mkinitramfs "package", and it's pretty much working for me now. (Notes on the SVN: It's hosted on an ADSL, so it's probably going to be slow. It's also using a self-signed cert, which has fingerprint "41:26:41:7e:16:7f:ba:2d:62:7d:ef:4b:70:6c:4f:76:b7:6c:a1:1b". It's *also* read-only without credentials, and I'm the only one that has them so far.) Some notes on the design: Licensing is GPLv2-only, because of gen_init_cpio.c. The license of the other tools in there should be GPLv2-compatible, I hope. I have mkinitramfs getting dependencies for binaries from ldd, because hardcoding the glibc loader (and libs) would be wrong if it grabbed any 64-bit binaries from the running system. Normal LFS doesn't install any 64-bit binaries, but I'm on a multilib CLFS, so to test it I had to grab whichever libs are required by the binaries. And if multilib CLFS support isn't that hard, this package could probably be used by them also. I have it copying all kernel modules into the initramfs, which ends up making it enormous if I run it after installing the nvidia module. (The nvidia module is 9M. Non-nvidia modules total up to about another 8-9M uncompressed on my system. The compressed initramfs is about 8M.) I could just copy modules that are expected to be required to get the root FS up, but then I'd have to rerun depmod, and that means I'd have to create a separate copy of the /lib/modules/$KVER tree. I have a default module blacklist set up to include just ivtv. Any module that requires firmware should be added to this list though; otherwise, without the firmware, the module won't initialize properly. (And I don't copy /lib/firmware to the initramfs. Perhaps I should.) I have mkinitramfs strip out all the GROUP keys in udev rules, because group lookups don't work without glibc's NSS libraries (which aren't included). But group membership of the devices doesn't matter, either, since everything in the initramfs runs as root, and these files don't get moved to the real system's /dev. I used the livecd's /init as the basis for this initramfs's /init, though a few things changed because it uses different programs. (For instance, the package contains klibc's run-init, mount, and umount programs, and klibc's mount doesn't take the -n option.) This package does *not* require cpio. It contains a modified version of the kernel tree's usr/gen_init_cpio.c that can take its input from stdin, and it just echos the right strings to that program to generate the archive. This program is (like mount, umount, and run-init) installed into /usr/share as data, since users probably shouldn't ever need to run it manually. (End of notes.) I'd like to get this working with devmapper and dm-raid if possible eventually (and other setups), though I can't test any of that. But before I do that, I'd like to get some comments from others. 1) Do we need this? (I think we do, since the kernel people expect it to be available, at least. It probably doesn't have to be installed in the book, but we probably need a note pointing the user to something if we don't put this in.) 2) Might some other design work better? (I want end users to be able to just say "mkinitramfs" and have everything work, if possible. Heck, I'm a user of this, and that's all I want to do. ;-) A few options may be required, like the current version's -k/--kernel-ver option that builds against a different kernel, but I'd like to keep those minimal. I still have to add -?/-h/--help though. And a manpage.) 3) Any other comments/issues? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFGdxGLS5vET1Wea5wRA6RFAJ9cBQ7LJdMXWIeIo7JGZc3m0UxxPwCfUij1 QxlN3d/ZBGTAEOKj0B+iMbQ= =y1/0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
