LFS bootable CD [was re: [CLUE-Cert] Next meeting]

djperkins at americanisp.net djperkins at americanisp.net
Wed Oct 23 14:38:55 MDT 2002


> Lynn Danielson wrote:
> > Dennis wrote:
> > 
> >>I've been working on a bootable CD. Hopefully, I will have it working
> >>later tonight.  There are a few missing things in the hint.
> > 
> > 
> > Very cool.  I've been reading the "Bootable LFS CD Using LILO" hint
> > printout that you gave me and you're right there are a few things
> > missing, but my biggest problem was that it requires starting with
> > an lfs system to build the cd system from.  One of the things that
> > bugged me in the linuxrc script was the pivot_root call.
> 
> pivot_root is a system call that changes the root directory on a running 
> system.  Debian uses it like this.  When you boot, the kernel is told to 
> use an initial ramdisk so it loads the disk image into memory (a 
> ramdisk) and mounts that as /.  The ramdisk doesn't have much on it, but 
> it does have kernel modules like the ext2 driver you need to mount your 
> hard disk.  Once the appropriate modules are loaded, the kernel mounts a 
> hard disk partition and does a pivot_root.  Now it is in (essentially) 
> the same condition it would have been if ext2 had been compiled in and 
> the hard disk mounted in the first place.
> 
> pivot_root(8), pivot_root(2), initrd(4), and initrd.txt in the kernel 
> docs have more info.  I read them extensively trying to figure out how 
> to get Debian to mount / as ext3 and they weren't much help (turned out 
> to be a module ordering problem).
> 
> I don't remember how LFS uses pivot_root.  The effort to make a bootable 
> CD didn't seem interesting and was towards the end of my time on the LFS 
> lists.
> 
> Dave
> 
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Actually, you could probably use any distro to build the CD because you're 
going to build everything
anyway.




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