Re: [OSR-devel] Diet initrd (was: GlusterFS OSR?)

[<go...@bo...>]

On Thu, 17 Apr 2008, Marc Grimme wrote:

>>>>>> On a separate node, am I correct in presuming that the diet version of
>>>>>> the initrd with the kernel drivers pruned and additional package
>>>>>> filtering added as per the patch I sent a while back was not deemed a
>>>>>> good idea?
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks for reminding me. I forgot to answer, sorry.
>>>>>
>>>>> The idea itself is good. But originally and by concept the initrd it
>>>>> designed to be an initrd used for different hardware configurations.
>>>>
>>>> Same initrd for multiple configurations? Why is this useful? Different
>>>> configurations could also run different kernels, which would invalidate
>>>> the shared initrd concept...
>>>
>>> No necessarily. I was a design idea and still is a kind of USP and most
>>> important something other customers use.
>>>
>>> Just a small example why. Let's suppose you have servers from HP the same
>>> Product branch (like HP DL38x) but of different generations. Then the
>>> onboard nics would on older ones be the tg3/bmc5700 driver whereas newer
>>> Generations use bnx2 drivers for their onboard nics. And then when
>>> bringing in IBM/Sun/Dell whatever other servers it becomes more
>>> complicated. And all this should be handled by one single shared boot.
>>>
>>> Did this explain the problem?
>>
>> How do you work around the fact that each node needs a different
>> modprobe.conf for the different NIC/driver bindings?
>
> The hardware detection takes place in the initrd and the "generated" initrd is
> copied during bootprocess on the rootdisk.

Ah, OK. I didn't realize that this bit of NIC detection logic happens in 
the initrd. I thought it just went by modprobe.conf.

Anyway - attached is the updated patch for
create-gfs-initrd-generic.sh

mkinitrd now takes the -l parameter (l for "light"). I thought about using 
getopt instead of getopts for long parameters, but since the current 
implementation uses getopts bash builtin, I decided to stick with it. When 
-l is passed, only modules currently loaded and those listed in 
modprobe.conf are loaded into the initrd. This reduces the initrd image by 
about 10MB (in my case from 53MB to 43MB).

I have also attached the patch for chroot-lib.sh. This is the same patch I 
sent previously, that adds optional exclusion filtering in the rpm list 
files. Old format is still supported - if the 2nd filtering parameter (the 
one for excluding files) is ommitted, it will be ignored and the exclusion 
not performed.

Gordan