[klibc] mkrootdev utility

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Tue Apr 11 21:51:50 PDT 2006


Aaron Griffin wrote:
> On 4/11/06, Olaf Hering <olh at suse.de> wrote:
>>  On Tue, Apr 11, Aaron Griffin wrote:
>>
>>> +        return create_dev("/dev/root", rootdev);
>> That always bothered me. Cant you give it just the kernel name?
> 
> In addition to HPA's response, I always found it kind of like a
> shortcut.  Firstly, the /dev nodes generally won't persist on to
> userspace, so the naming is arbitrary.

... except they show up in /proc/mounts, which is probably the complaint.

It'd be pretty trivial to use a name if we were given one by the user 
(e.g. root=/dev/hda1).  That should cover 80% of all cases of so.  We 
could add walking the sysfs tree later, that should cover another 15% or 
thereabouts.

However, I would prefer to defer this change until after klibc integration.

> Secondly, it seems easier, in
> my eyes, to check for an existing /dev/root node rather than checking
> some $ROOT environment variable (whoops, it's numeric, thanks vmware -
> /dev/303 doesn't exist... time to parse that out) - by this, I am
> implying some sort of /init script with minimal error checking before
> calling kinit (echo "Error: Root device not found...").

	-hpa



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