[klibc] Early-userspace development

[H. Peter Anvin]

Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
> 
> Before I get started, I wanted to list the major points I see that need
> to be done to make sure I'm not duplicating anyone else's efforts, or
> reinventing something that's already been done. The way I see it, the
> following things (in no particular order) need to be accomplished:
> 
> - integrating the configuration and building of "standard" packages into
> the kernel build process so they can be part of the initramfs (packages
> like mdadm, lvm2, util-linux, busybox, etc.)

I think this is not desirable; a lot of these tools are either too big
or requires too much library support.  They definitely shouldn't be part
of the kernel built.

> - modifying the existing kernel start-up code to either remove, or just
> disable, code that is being moved into userspace (partition reading, md
> startup, etc.)

The first part is to actually create (small!) userspace equivalents.
Everyone seems to agree that the first thing to go should be
ipconfig/nfsroot.  We have some code for that already in the klibc
tarball (as opposed to Greg's integrated patch), but it needs to be
turned into a working binary which can use the ip= and nfsroot=
parameters passed to existing kernels to configure IP and mount the nfsroot.

It needs to be a "drop in" replacement before we can remove it from the
kernel.

This is definitely the #1 priority.

	-hpa
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