Anders Johansson wrote:
On Saturday 19 January 2002 18.19, Nadeem Hasan wrote:
You are assuming that everyone uses and needs initrd. That is not true.
and you are assuming everyone uses and needs lilo. That is not true.
look at grub, for instance
My bad in assuming that :) You are right, it would be a *really* bad idea if lilo was executed automatically. But I am still unable to buy the initrd idea from ckm. He keeps talking about people needing initrd, while I was only talking about people who don't. Those are the people who don't use reiserfs for root fs, scsi disks or RAID and hence don't need to build initrd. I was one of those till lately, before I moved to ext3 on LVM :) Cheers, -- Nadeem Hasan nhasan@nadmm.com http://www.nadmm.com/
On Mon, 21 Jan 2002 10:35:12 -0500 Nadeem Hasan <nhasan@nadmm.com> wrote:
Anders Johansson wrote:
On Saturday 19 January 2002 18.19, Nadeem Hasan wrote:
You are assuming that everyone uses and needs initrd. That is not true.
and you are assuming everyone uses and needs lilo. That is not true.
look at grub, for instance
My bad in assuming that :) You are right, it would be a *really* bad idea if lilo was executed automatically. But I am still unable to buy the initrd idea from ckm. He keeps talking about people needing initrd, while I was only talking about people who don't. Those are the people who don't use reiserfs for root fs, scsi disks or RAID and hence don't need to build initrd. I was one of those till lately, before I moved to ext3 on LVM :)
If you keep up with the Linux Kernel Mailinglist, you will notice that the plan is to make initrd mandatory in 2.5x > I'm pretty sure if you know that you do not need initrd on your boxes that you know what to do and not do :-) -- Viel Spaß Peter Nixon - nix@susesecurity.com SuSE Security FAQ Maintainer http://www.susesecurity.com/faq/ "If you think cryptography will solve the problem, then you don't understand cryptography and you don't understand your problem."
On Wednesday 23 January 2002 17:05, Peter Nixon wrote:
On Mon, 21 Jan 2002 10:35:12 -0500
Nadeem Hasan <nhasan@nadmm.com> wrote:
Anders Johansson wrote:
On Saturday 19 January 2002 18.19, Nadeem Hasan wrote:
If you keep up with the Linux Kernel Mailinglist, you will notice that the plan is to make initrd mandatory in 2.5x >
Err, that's only partially true, from the discussions I've seen. Work planned and started in 2.5, then all kernel inititial root filesystems will be loaded by a hidden compressed 'initial ram disk', which will be loaded along with the kernel, as it'll be tacked to the end of it. Alan Cox actually wrote he'd like _all_ drivers being modules only and not even be compilable in, the kernel build code would have to decide what's necessary in the hidden initrd. See recent lwn.net kernel list report if you're interested in the details. Linus objected strongly, last summer to making the current initrd framework compulsory on ease of use grounds, when the idea of _always_ using the boot loader for initial root was discussed to avoid special case '/' code. Hence the paper, on a new format (based on a cpio.gz archive) which recently received publicity. It is to be tacked onto end of the kernel, by the kbuild system (L. decreed a simple cat initial-root-file >> bzImage should be possible), and should _not_ require a seperate 'distro' command to create it. The point is that modules and initrd's ought to become easier, and things are moving to more dynamic distro style kernels, rather than custom compiles, for maintenance reasons. Those objections on security grounds that modules are less secure, are weakened, as there's code around to patch monolithic kernels with analagous to adding or altering kernel modules. I also suspect that once the new initial root filesystem code is in the kernel, someone will be able to optomise the memory layout of those modules by having them next to the kernel, and avoid the current TLB overhead, which is the basis for some objections to using modules. Could lead to some interesting space/efficiency tradeoffs on kernel sizes. It'll be interesting to see how it works out in practice once they come to trying deploying it for real. Rob
participants (3)
-
Nadeem Hasan -
Peter Nixon -
Robert Davies