Hello!
[Mon, 07 Jun 2004] John Goerzen wrote:
> DFS explicitly does *not* do hardware autodetection on boot, though it
> prints out a message on boot telling the user how to run discover or
> hotplug. The reason is that, as a recovery tool, you may not want to
> attempt this discovery (and that could especially be the case if, for
> instance, your network controller is fried and the kernel hangs trying
> to bring it up).
>
> Another goal is to make the kernel be one that somebody can slap onto
> their hard disk in an emergency and be able to boot from their hard disk
> again. I actually initially was going to not use modules at all to make
> it easier, but when I realized that some Ethernet module's probing code
> hangs machines, I abandoned that course :-) However, I still think that
> mkinitrd or some such solution is too complex and error-prone for this
> use.
>
> The stock Debian kernels are unsuitable for a number of reasons. One is
> that they do not have enough filesystems, LVM/RAID, etc. compiled in, so
> they are unsuitable for emergency use in a lot of situations (requiring
> an initrd just to be able to grok the root fs in these cases).
>
> I am not terribly troubled by a 5MB kernel size for this application,
> actually. I don't know a lot about PowerPC subarchs, but on Alpha we do
> have subarchs but can compile a "generic" kernel that runs everywhere,
> which is what I have done. I'm not all that concerned, in general,
> about running on machines old enough that they can't run a 5MB kernel
> and bash at the same time.
>
> DFS kernels also omit things that are not necessary for
> installation/repair work. For instance, sound and video4linux are
> completely disabled. The DFS kernels are here to give people a live,
> working system to use to repair or install Debian and build a custom
> kernel from there.
I'd really like to be able to build DFS images "en masse" for each and
every purpose. Just like all those crazy people that praise their "Yet
another Knoppix remastered" as the new holy grail. It's just that their
remastering process is so "manual" (and BTW their mental contribution is
not that much). ;-]
So. I'd really like to see DFS not only becoming a "Yet another Rescue
CD" but also "the first fully automatized live CD generation system".
Robert.
--
A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the
power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly,
"You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding
of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The
machine worked.
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