On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 7:08 PM, Joshua Kinard <ku...@gentoo.org> wrote: > That's what I take issue with -- the whims of a commercial enterprise > ultimately deciding, at some possible, future point, what path we take. In > other words, those of us not running cluster farms shouldn't have to change > things, even slightly (like using an initramfs if needed) for those that do. > Linux's greatest asset is its extreme configurability -- a single source > tree can be compiled to run on super computers or cable boxes.
For what it's worth, I've got a simple alternative to the initramfs approach, that may be handy for people like you. The idea is to enable CONFIG_DEVTMPFS=y and CONFIG_DEVTMPFS_MOUNT=y in the kernel, pass something like init=/sbin/linuxrc as a kernel parameter via the bootloader, and have /sbin/linuxrc be a simple shell script that mounts /proc, /sys, and /usr before calling 'exec /sbin/init'. You can use whatever shell you want for /sbin/linuxrc, as long as it doesn't have some kind of dependency on /usr. For example, if you want your script to run using a really minimal shell with the fewest possible dependencies, you can put '#!/sbin/busybox ash' in the shebang so that it will use your statically linked busybox. Something like this should do the trick in /sbin/linuxrc: #!/sbin/busybox ash mount -t proc proc /proc mount -t sysfs sysfs /sys mount /usr exec /sbin/init -- Thanks, Zac
