Better error handling

Better error handling

[Harald Hoyer]

While talking to David Zeuthen, he mentioned that our current error handling is 
not very user friendly and I agree.

Presenting the user the message "Boot has failed, sleeping forever." does not 
really help.

Instead of displaying the message, we could:

- turn "rdshell" into "rd.no_shell" and drop to a shell by default.
   Admins with security concerns will lock grub with a password, and can add
   the "rd.no_shell" parameter.

- add simple tools to present the user a list of mountable partitions, assemble 
lvms, md, dmraid and mount network devices.


What do you think?

Re: Better error handling

[Amadeusz Żołnowski]

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Excerpts from Harald Hoyer's message of Wed Oct 06 13:39:56 +0200 2010:
> Presenting the user the message "Boot has failed, sleeping forever." does not 
> really help.
> 
> Instead of displaying the message, we could:
> 
> - turn "rdshell" into "rd.no_shell" and drop to a shell by default.
>    Admins with security concerns will lock grub with a password, and can add
>    the "rd.no_shell" parameter.

Wouldn't it be a problem for "admins with security concerns" anyway?


> - add simple tools to present the user a list of mountable partitions

We already have functions probing devices, so adding this feature would
be quite easy.  It might be useful.  I can handle this if people are
looking forward for that feature.


A few my ideas:

1) Warning message on boot when option in 'rd' namespace isn't used,
e.g. when module using this option isn't included.

2) We have too much and too little info about what's going on - we have
either full debug or none.  I'd suggest having logging levels.

3) Printing, which module is being sourced, by default.


Cheers,
-- 
Amadeusz Żołnowski

PGP key: E1DBFAB5

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