nash, cpio and linuxrc

[Gildas Bayard]

Le jeudi 24 février 2005 à 09:35 +0100, Féliciano Matias a écrit :
> Le mercredi 23 février 2005 à 17:07 +0100, Gildas Bayard a écrit :
> > Hello,
> > 
> > First of all, please direct me to an other mailing list if I'm going off
> > topic.
> > I've investigated a bit the initrd system and there are some questions I
> > could no find answers for:
> > - why are regular desktop distributions always using the initrd system?
> 
> It's require for "root=LABEL=/" and udev.
Ok. I'll look at that deeper. Thanx
> 
> > I understand that this system is mandatory to load exotic scsi drivers
> > or add a pause when booting to usb but I wonder why it is always used
> > - on kernel 2.4 (red hat 9) the initrd image is an ext2 filesystems.
> 
> For *your* system. My initrd also contain raid0 and dm-mod
> (see /sbin/mkinitrd and "man mkinitrd").
No I mean the initrd file is an ext2 filesystem (whatever it contains)
On FC3 it is a cpio archive. Why? And why when initrd is a cpio archive
it would not load linuxrc?
Answers to these question are not in man initrd, man nash...
> 
> >  It
> > contains a linuxrc nash script. On kernel 2.6 (fedora 3) the initrd is a
> > cpio archive and does not contains a linuxrc script. Could someone
> > briefly explain me why these differences? Particularly I wondering about
> > 3 things:
> > 1) I tried to repack my custom initrd ext2 filesystem into a cpio
> > archive and found that when packed as a cpio archive it's not executing
> > my linuxrc script (is it the way it's supposed to be?)
> 
> use "/init".
Well I want to understand why my linuxrc is not run when in a cpio
archive and again what the matter with the cpio archive
> 
> > 2) What are the differences between pivot_root and switch_root (new in
> > 2.6) ?
> > 3) Why using nash in the first place?
> 
> nash is a mini-mini-mini-shell (bash is TTOOOO big). See "man nash".
man nash does not explain what is the rational for both pivot_root and
switch_root (just give a small description).
=> Why pivot_root was not enough?
=> Why not wait until the end of linuxrc to jump to the new root fs?

I would like to know how to get in touch with nash coders. On which
forum or mailing list could they be hanging on?
> >  Could we just wait until the end
> > of the linuxrc script? At that time the kernel would move to the new
> > root fs (whitout the need for pivot_root or switch_root)
> > 
> > And finally, if I'm right the end of the nash script (after switch_root)
> > is never executed?
> > 
> > Gildas
> > 
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