Re: /linuxrc query

[Amit D Chaudhary <amit@muppetlabs.com>]

Hi,

Also as a note, what we are doing is keeping our rootfs on flash as a tar.gz and 
reading it and mounting it on a ramfs in the /linuxrc before doing a pivot_root. 
To summarize, pivot_root has been a life saver as the earlier real_root_dev 
might not have been useful in this case.
Not using the ramfs limits for now, will do soon.

Thanks
Amit

Werner Almesberger wrote:

> Amit D Chaudhary wrote:
> 
>> what does redirecting stdin\stdout\stderr to dev/console achieve? I thought 
>> since the root is now the "new" root, dev/console will be used automatically?
> 
> 
> No, you would continue using the file descriptors which are already
> open, i.e. on /dev/console on the old root.
> 
> 
>> Also, why chroot, why not call init directly?
> 
> 
> To make sure the root of the current process is indeed changed.
> pivot_root currently forces a chroot on all processes (except the
> ones that have explicitly moved out of /) in order to move all the
> kernel threads too, but this is not a nice solution. Once a better
> solution is implemented for the kernel threads, we might drop the
> forced chroot, and then the explicit chroot here becomes important.
> 
> 
>> Since the above never returns, what follows in not freed.
> 
> 
> You can run them later, e.g. /etc/rc.d/rc.local
> Or, if you needs the space immediately,  make "what-follows" a
> script than first frees them, and then exec's init.
> 
> - Werner