[PATCH] mkinitrd rescue mode

[Peter Jones]

On Mon, 2005-06-06 at 15:56 -0400, Jeff Layton wrote:

> > > It would also give people the ability to try to rescue corrupted root
> > > filesystems without needing special infrastructure (like a PXE server) 
> > > and without having to physically be near the machine (with a CD boot).
> > 
> > This is a strawman -- your scenario is that they've just installed or
> > upgraded, in which case they've already set up this infrastructure or
> > are already close to the box.
> > 
> 
> Not necessarily -- serial consoles are very common in datacenters.

How does that matter?  They've still either got CDs and are standing in
front of the box, or they've set up the infrastructure for netboot and
whatnot.

> I'm with you -- extra complexity is generally bad, but in this case I
> don't see where it's harmful. If you don't want to use it, don't add
> "rescue" to the commandline (or generate your initrd images without
> it). 

I just don't think there's a significant amount of benefit.  Using the
rescue image just isn't a very difficult task.

> To make sure I understand what you're proposing as an alternative...
> 
> You're proposing having a secondary cpio image containing the "rescue"
> tools. We'd then pass this as a secondary initrd image to GRUB. We could
> then either use the rescue command line parameter (more or less as-is),
> or could key off the presence of something from the rescue image to
> enter rescue mode.

Right.  And I like the second way better -- because once you've decided
you sometimes need to do debugging stuff, you can add the second initrd
and just keep on using it.  Then ignore it until you need it again.

> If so, that would be acceptable to me, but I'll have to see how multiple
> cpio archives work in practice (I've never used them).

Me neither -- let me know how it works for you ;)
-- 
        Peter