On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 18:57 -0700, Jan Setje-Eilers wrote:
> For the purposes of this project (new boot SPARC), we can avoid this
> problem by not placing editable files into the boot_archive.
> kobj_open() would be modified to read read any files it fails to find
> in the archive (if they exist at all) from the filesystem via the
> firmware. This has the up-side that it keeps all these files from
> invalidating the archive. The down-side is that it's one more place
> the kernel will continue to call into OBP. It's also a SPARC only
> solution. It should however fully address these concerns for the sake
> of this project on SPARC.
I think this addresses my fears in the short term, though we do need to
see a revised spec which nails down specifics of how files may be
excluded from the archive.
> Beyond this project we can investigate more drastic approaches that
> eliminate this issue on all architectures. We could have the
> boot-loader (a modified and extended GRUB on x86 and the bootblock or
> more likely a standalone on SPARC) read all the files that would
> ordinarily make up the archive into memory at the time of boot, and
> then boot that data-structure (which basically contains everything the
> archive contains today).
...
This also sounds like the right answer for the long run; if it would
help make it happen we could derail and issue an opinion with advice
that this approach should be investigated.
- Bill
