Re: [OSR-devel] initrd dieting coreutils vs. busybox

[Marc G. <gr...@at...>]

----- "Gordan Bobic" <go...@bo...> wrote:

> Marc Grimme wrote:
> 
> > Hm. I like that awk, grep, etc are going with busybox on the one
> hand.
> > That would make things easier. I'll think about that.
> 
> OK. I'm more than happy to help with the testing/implementation of
> this. 
> As far as I can tell, all that would be required is creating the 
> symlinks - doable with something like:
> 
> ./busybox --help |\
> grep 'Currently defined functions:' -A30 \
> | grep '^\s.*,' \
> | tr , '\n' \
> | xargs -n1 -i{} ln -s busybox {}
> 
> (that's off the top of my head, don't quote me on it, and -A30 may be
> 
> too low)
> 
> and pruning out the packages that are made redundant by it. If taking
> it 
> to the extreme and dropping bash as well, then all the shell scripts 
> would need to be checked to reference /bin/sh instead if /bin/bash,
> and 
> they'd need testing to make sure that they aren't broken by some bash
> 
> vs. sh obscurity.
Right. But that's much work.
There are many bash deps inside the code. I'm currently cleaning it up a little bit. But I don't see to get rid of bash in near time.

As we are also going to support dracut as initrd for future clusters - on distros where it will be available (FC12, RHEL6, SLES???) - all this done there. They are using dash (posix shell). Currently we did not port the cluster filesystem parts but NFS to dracut.

So bottomline is we'll stay with bash in bootscripts as it's too much work to move so far. Especially when I expect dracut to overpower our initrd.
> 
> > BTW: I'm currently developing an initrd without the need of python
> and
> > friends. That will really spare a lot of space ;-) .
> 
> Now that IS interesting. What is python stuff actually used for? In
> all 
> my modding and patching of OSR I've never actually bumped into any 
> python code.
com-queryclusterconf is python. And this queries the clusterconfiguration in a general way. This is required right now.

AND most importantly for GFS clusters we need fenceagents in the initrd and most are based on python. Although we could add those later on via bootsr.

But when we are getting rid of the com-queryclusterconf python dep we could build initrds without python/perl for NFS,OCFS2, glusterfs and localfs.

> 
> Gordan
> 
> P.S.
> We seem to have drifted off the list again... :-/
This is a development list. And I'm only forgeting to CC it all the time ;-) . It might be interesting to other people as well.

-- 

Marc Grimme