On Thu, Jun 3, 2021 at 12:20 PM Jon LaBadie <jo...@jgcomp.com> wrote: > > On my 3 systems, F34, F34, and CentOS7, they are > 1, 2, and 6 years old respectively. > > Are old rescue kernels still useful? (6 years?)
They might be useful to a sysadmin, I think they are useless. The rescue kernel is really just a "no host-only" initramfs that contains a bunch of extra dracut and kernel modules that the host only initramfs doesn't. The difficulty is the rescue initramfs can't do a full graphical boot once /usr/lib/modules/ dir for that kernel has been removed, which was likely in its first 4 weeks following installation. Since you won't get graphical boot anyway, I'm not sure you have a good chance of dracut building a new host only initramfs that contains the driver needed for whatever new hardware you've added or changed to. It's pretty esoteric landing in a dracut shell even for experienced users. So I am not a fan. What I would like to see is (a) an initramfs that can boot a graphical stack (b) contains the Live OS dracut modules (c) and overlayfs, and wire it up so that the rescue boot entry does a read-only sysroot boot + writable overlay like a LiveOS. So now folks can use a web browser normally, get on irc or whatever, and get some help with why they can't boot without having to resort to mobile or a 2nd computer they may not have handy. A side plus for Btrfs cases, it has a unique ro,rescue=all mount option that tolerates file system problems. Plausibly we can still boot read-only in situations where other file systems would face plant until they get an fsck. Whereas on Btrfs we really want to steer folks towards freshening backups before they attempt a repair, if they end up in a disaster situation. But nevertheless, such an effort would be generically beneficial no matter the file system. A variation on that might be a read-only "rescue" or "recovery" snapshot that would be immutable, paired with the same LiveOS+overlayfs concept. That way a boot is possible in a variety of other more likely user error or update related scenarios, i.e. file system isn't damaged, it's the installation that's messed up, and what you need is a live boot but don't have a USB stick handy, so just bake it into a small snapshot. *shrug* maybe. We could make it completely self contained including the kernel, initramfs, and the whole graphics stack. But, near term such a thing would be btrfs only unless we dedicate a literal partition and stick a Live OS ISO image on it (effectively). -- Chris Murphy _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
