[klibc] Early-userspace development

[Kevin P. Fleming]

H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>>- 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.

I was thinking along the lines of userspace replacement of partition 
discovery, md autostart, etc. Are you suggesting that using the existing 
tools for those tasks (albeit modified to work in the klibc/initramfs 
environment) is not a goal any longer?

> 
> 
>>- 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.

That's certainly understandable. Unfortunately I haven't got the systems 
here to be able to test anything like that, so I can't really work on 
that side of things.

> 
> This is definitely the #1 priority.
> 

In spite of that, is there any reason not to proceed with working on 
things like /sbin/hotplug-based partition discovery (my first goal at 
this point)?