On 14 Dec 2001, Cees de Groot wrote:
> ('diskless' means 'without any local state' :-))
>
> I was wondering whether it was doable/feasible/sensible or downright stupid to
> use Linux' initrd feature to:
> - start AFS from the initrd disk
> - have a dummy root filesystem on the local disk, with just symlinks into
> AFS (some of them made during boot so you point to the /etc for the correct
> node, etcetera);
> in order to obtain a configuration with no considerable local state. Has
> anyone tried this? It should work (anything goes with initrd :-)), but I
> wonder how much work it is to make it work.
Offhand, this seems like a bad idea. Virtually all programs in a running
Linux system are demand-paged from disk. Imagine for a moment what would
happen if the fileserver on which init lived went away, thereby preventing
init from being paged in.
I also have no confidence at the moment that AFS still works in the initrd
environment. While an initrd is in use, kernel startup has not completely
finished. I used to support installing RedHat systems via AFS, but had to
stop doing that with RH7.1 when AFS stopped working in the initrd
environment.
-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sr. Research Systems Programmer
School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA
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