Re: My installation story

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

> Is there any way, other than rebooting, of changing the root device
> on-the-fly? 

Yes. You can boot with a sort of pre-root that works well enough to
load the module to drive the real root device and then switch to that
device. See the documentation on "initrd" in the kernel.

However, this doesn't work quite well enough to run the installation
root that way, at least without changes to the tiny init program used
on the installation root. My major complaint with it is that when
running on the pre-root, "init" is process-ID 4, and init's shutdown
behavior gets messed up because it can't kill all processes the way it
usually does without killing itself. It gets special protection against
killing itself or catching unhandled signals when it is PID 1.

I think I can kludge around the above by using /proc. 

	Thanks

	Bruce
--
Bruce Perens, Pixar Animation Studios
*** "Toy Story" video tape in U.S. stores October 30 ***
Worldwide box office total for "Toy Story": $353,275,005

--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-devel-REQUEST@lists.debian.org . Trouble? e-mail to Bruce@Pixar.com