Want to help QA the Test1 release?

[Jane Dogalt]

Replying to myself again...

--- Jane Dogalt <jdogalt at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
> --- Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Thursday 25 January 2007 17:38, Jane Dogalt wrote:
> > > I guess I should go read the rest of that thread to figure out
> > where
> > > the work remains to get a pungi/mock build that doesn't require
> any
> > > root priveleges...
> > 
> > A way for users to create and mount loopback filesystems for the
> > anaconda 
> > stage1/2 images.
> 
> 
> How's this:
> 
> I've been deep in the initrd created by pilgrim for livecds...
> 
> I've recently read someones post on this list suggesting that an
> initrd
> could be fleshed out into a fully functional rescue system...
> 
> I've been in the initrd pursuing my rebootless installer idea, which
> actually looks pretty trivial... (I'm confident it will be done by
> fudcon)....
> 
> I've been upset at how much time I've spent on various hacks to
> provide
> input to qemu, when it appears the --append, --kernel, and --initrd
> probably will get me what I need in a cleaner way...
> 
> AND NOW... 
> 
> I think I can solve the problem you just stated-
> 
> make an initrd as fat or a bit fatter even than the pilgrim livecd,
> then use qemu with no system image other than a specified
> kernel/initrd
> that come from the running system.

Of course, since we no longer need loop/mount/mkfs for initramfs, you
of course just build a custom initramfs based on existing ones, but
adding the tools you need, i.e. mkfs.<whatever> (and libs, as par
pilgrim script)

Or, if you really wanted to be sick, you could just pass the host root
filesystem as a read only device to qemu, then have your custom
initramfs mount it, chroot to it, and work from it mounted read only,
writing data either to /dev/hdb as mentioned, or via qemu's emulated
samba server.  But certainly for pungi, this would be overkill, since
all you would need is the short script

qmkfs -t <filesystem type> -o <mkfs opts> -r <src root dir> [-s
transmogrifyscript.sh] <output_filesystem_image>

So it grabs mkfs.<filesystem type> from the host filesystem, copies it
to the new initramfs along with the transmogrifyscript (for changing
ownership/permissions of files and any other arbitrary stuff).  Then it
runs qemu with the new initramfs as described, eventually extracting
the output to the file specified.

I suppose if nobody else writes the above shell script first, I'll get
around to it sooner or later...

(I'm actually using a much more convoluted system currently which uses
an entire fedora core installation that was just generated.  Until I
was digging deep into the very flexible initramfs in pilgrim (maybe not
much different from core, I haven't looked), I didn't realize I could
practically do everything I needed to do as root in just the initramfs
environment.  I want to give credit to Jason

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-January/msg01191.html

who combined with my own sick adventures of creating md-raid1 mirrors
underneath dm-snapshots by hand using DavidZ's pilgrim's initramfs
eshell, inspired this design of qmkfs.

-dmc/jdog



 
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