> It's worth recognizing and mentioning that perhaps this boot loader
> could actually be a full linux kernel and a very small / that simply
> "kexec"s a new kernel from the USB storage once it's mounted at /.
> I wonder how portable kexec is amongst the processors Linux runs on.
That would be nice indeed. Tho with the current setup of flash storing
kernel+initrd, the only problem is that you can only have a single
kernel installed at a time, and that your modules should match
your kernel.
There are a few other problems left with the current setup which could
be fixed without going for a kexec approach: some of the boot procedure
done after the pivot_root depends on the boot procedure done before.
E.g. hotplug2 is started before the pivot_root and killed afterwards.
When such things change, you get into trouble because you then have to
upgrade your flash in sync with your rootfs.
Another problem is that the `base-files' package is not cleanly
described, so you can't cleanly upgrade it (e.g. it doesn't flag
/etc/passwd as a conffile, so when you upgrade base-files, your
/etc/passwd gets wiped out). Most other packages have a more or less
clean upgrade path.
Stefan
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