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====== week - 6 ====== Targets decided for this week are * Add fedora live CD to BKO * Improve the user facing page of BKO * Improve the boot time menu ===== 29 - 30 July ===== - Started to work on Fedora live CD - Collected all basic stuff needed - Live CD - Initrd and kernel - Kernel modules for networking - It has taken unreasonably long time as fedora_11 lives cd was exceptionally slow on qemu for me, I couldn't get needed kernel modules from inside CD. - I decided to migrate to kvm for better performance. but I was getting error ''could not open /dev/kvm: No such file or directory'' - After breaking my head around for some time, it seems my brand new laptop does not have support for virtualization :-( - For time being, I am using virtual-box, it works fast enough, but only problem with virtualBox is, virtual machine does not pick up the IP address using DHCP as it happens with qemu '' -net user'' option. This means that my all gpxe scripts which do use dhcp by default will not work any more :-( - I have not yet fixed this problem of dhcp support in virtualbox, I have postponed the solution finding for this problem for time being. ===== 1 - 2 July ===== - Wrote script which can generate new modified initramfs automatically with everything added from original initramfs. - Now, actual work of understanding /init script and understanding how they use iso image as root starts. - Done with modifications in /sbin/real-init which will (hopefully) mount the httpfs partition over root. - Initial runs were not very promising, when tried to boot this modified fedora live cd over BKO using qemu, it dropped me in rescue shell :!: - There were few error messages in boot sequence - ''mount: only root can do that'' - ''getKernelCmdLine: failed to open /proc/cmdline: No such file or directory'' - ''creating initial /dev : only root can do that'' ===== 3 July ===== - Pin-pointed the cause - when I tried command ''mount -t proc proc /proc'' It gave error saying ''mount: only root can do that'' - But as this command is executed from within initrd, it is executed as root, so How can I get that error :?: - With tip from AndyTim, it seemed that the initrd was created by non-root user, so even if those commands are executed by root, they don't have root privilages. - It is strange in many ways, as initrd by non-root user works fine for ubuntu and other distributions I have tried. - I suspect that selinux security policies are enforcing these extra rules as fedora is having selinux in enforcing mode. - Anyways, creating initrd by root user does make sense in some ways. So, I will follow this for all distributions. - The booting process has progressed, but now it is stuck at some other point. It just hangs without giving me rescue shell - I don't even know if it has used httpfs, all my ''echo'' messages are lost in fast scrolling output of qemu, and I am not able to scroll back and see, what was happening. I need to find some way to be able to see previous outputs. of qemu. I miss that feature seriously in qemu. ===== 4 July ===== - I will need one of the two things to be able to do debugging properly for problem in hand. - Scrolling support for qemu (so that I can see old outputs and my debug messages ) - dhcp support in virtual box (<del>I presume that it is having some kind of scrolling support</del> I tested and ''ALT+PG_UP'' does some scrolling up ) - Started my day with trying to find how to scroll in qemu, but nothing promising came out.
