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Nigel Kukard posted an announcement for an early version of "BootUtils". The utilities currently support the ext2, ext3, jfs, reiserfs and xfs filesystems. He explained:
"BootUtils is a collection of utilities to facilitate booting of modern Kernel 2.6 based systems. BootUtils is designed for initramfs, although volunteers to add support for initrd are welcome. The process of finding the root volume either by label or explicit label= on the kernel command line, mounting it and 'switchroot'ing is automated. BootUtils can also drop to emergency shell if the root volume cannot be mounted. Why not even start sshd and allow admin login if the box is in a remote location?"
From: Nigel Kukard [email blocked] Subject: [ANNOUNCE] BootUtils v0.0.7 Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 21:10:20 +0000 Project Description: BootUtils is a collection of utilities to facilitate booting of modern Kernel 2.6 based systems. BootUtils is designed for initramfs, although volunteers to add support for initrd are welcome. The process of finding the root volume either by label or explicit label= on the kernel command line, mounting it and 'switchroot'ing is automated. BootUtils can also drop to emergency shell if the root volume cannot be mounted. Why not even start sshd and allow admin login if the box is in a remote location? Features: * Automatic detection of root volume by label or explicit kernel commandline option * Supports ext2, ext3, jfs, reiserfs and xfs * Emergency shell dropping in the case of a root volume problem * Distribution independant Changes: * This release adds a raidscan tool that initiates the kernel's software raid auto-detect functionality. * It also adds some verbosity to switchroot. Website: http://www.freshmeat.net/projects/bootutils/
Are these scripts from
Are these scripts from Debian or Fedora or some distro and packaged for use generally? Or are they completely separate from the scripts used by the distros, a reimplementation?
One presumes the latter
One presumes that the scripts are absolutely independent of distribution. But by the same token they may require very specific actions that are either idempotent to or conflict with the distribution/distro version that you are running. As with all new, clever, distribution independent scripts, the script may be ignored, adopted in a later version of the distribution, or adopted later in a form that is not only unrecognizable and also incompatible with the script versions that other distributions have adopted.
Welcome to Linux.
It is not designed with any
It is not designed with any particular distribution in mind.
It probably won't work with a "regular" distro out of the box, but if you're simply booting off a local disk, it will work as long as you can guarantee that the essential kernel modules are being loaded (or statically compiled into the kernel). This might be as simple as copying over /lib/modules.
If you're a regular user though, there is little advantage in replacing your initrd/initramfs with a third party one. In the end, it doesn't really matter which distro's initramfs or initrd you boot -- all these systems end up doing is just executing the /sbin/init process from your root partition, which is universal among distributions (and even different Unix flavors).
Not true
This is not quite correct. There are several different init implementations. There is a difference between SysV init and BSD init, there is runit, minit and init-ng, not to mention upstart. Some distributions are in the process of phasing out the old-style init altogether.
future LUKS support?
Will there be future LUKS support in BootUtils? It would be really nice to have a standardized way of 'switchrooting' into my fully encrypted Linux system.
Maybe they'll also support
Maybe they'll also support detecting partitions in user-space, so that the kernel doesn't need to know about 20 or so partition schemes.