On 05/28/2015 07:48 AM, Michael Di Domenico wrote:
On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 9:56 PM, Joe Landman
<[email protected]> wrote:
There are some oddities, not the least of which most distributions are
decidedly not built for this. But if you get them to a point where they
think they have a /dev/root and they mount it, life generally gets much
easier rather quickly.
One of the other cool aspects of our mechanism is that we can pivot to a
hybrid or NFS after fully booting. And if the NFS pivot fails, we can fall
back to our ramboot without a reboot. Its a thing of beauty ... truly ...
Can you explain this in more detail? I currently pxe boot into
busybox and then pivot_root to boot up RHEL. it works well, but if it
fails, it gets all screwed up and i have to reboot. i'd like to know
more about how boot the os and recover back to the pxe image if it
fails, that sounds really handy... :)
Our pxe boot environment is not a whittled down thing, its a full blown,
fully operational stand alone Linux (Debian based) that *just works*.
Atop this, we included this:
https://scalability.org/2015/01/stateless-booting/
The fallback is a very simple check to see if the mount succeeded or
not. If so, we continue, if not, we skip the bind mounts and pivot_root.
We are working on a CentOS/RHEL version of this (though the brain damage
in the startup scripts there is far worse than in other distros ... see
https://scalability.org/2009/09/fighting-the-dmraidmdadm-battles-in-initrd-for-rhelcentos-5-x/
iand others, its worse in 6.x, and I expect no less pain in 7.x)
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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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Scalable Informatics, Inc.
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