What is 'Red Hat nash' in the boot sequence ???

[Gustavo Seabra]

Deron Meranda wrote:

>On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 02:37:14 -0600, Gain Paolo Mureddu
><gmureddu at prodigy.net.mx> wrote:
>  
>
>>Reg Clemens wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>What is the item 'Red Hat nash' that prints in the (early) boot
>>>seqence right after the 'Audit( ... )' line.
>>>      
>>>
>
>There's a manpage for nash:  man nash
>
>You can think of it like a little mini shell.  It interprets special
>script files at the very beginning of the boot process while the
>kernel is still trying to get all its pieces (modules, etc) bootstrapped.
>Nash is what runs much of the stuff that's configured in your
>initrd file.
>
>If you've ever looked at the grub bootloader configuration you'll
>have seen that there are two files that are referenced at the
>time the boot first starts: the kernel executable itself, and a
>corresponding initrd file.  The initrd file is really just a packaged
>filesystem (which in FC2 and earlier was a true ext2-formatted
>bytestream, and in FC3 is a cpio archive).  The initrd gets
>"mounted" into memory and is the initial RAM disk (hence the
>name initrd).  Among the most important things in the initrd are
>the various kernel modules which are needed, like SCSI drivers,
>etc.; before your actual disk-based filesystems (including /) can
>even be accessed and mounted.
>
>Well, nash is the interpreter which does all this initialization
>and loading of modules in their correct order, etc.
>
>I suspect you're probably asking about nash because you see
>it mentioned during the boot and it may appear to take a long
>time.  Nash itself is trivial and really doesn't take any time at
>all---it's similar to starting say the bash shell, only even much
>simpler.  However it's what nash is invoking, such as loading
>some initial kernel modules.  That's usually what takes time as
>some of those modules do things like scan all your hardware
>for devices, etc.  Nash normally runs in silent mode, so you
>don't get any feedback.  However it is possible to hack your
>initrd to tell get nash to print out what it's busy doing.
>
>All this is in the "mkinitrd" RPM package.  You can download
>the corresponding src.rpm file to get the source.
>  
>
Is there a *simple* way to get nash to print out what it's doing?

-- 
----------------------------------
Gustavo Seabra - Graduate Student
Chemistry Department
Kansas State University
----------------------------------
If at first you don't succeed...
      ...skydiving is not for you.