Activating md raid or lvm means that the kernel changes the metadata like
timestamps and mount counts of the devices and writes them to disk.
Also reconstructing degraded md raid devices is automatically activated.
There are cases when writing to disks is absolutely not wanted. For example
when restoring data from broken disks or when doing forensics.
The nomdlvm boot commandline option prevents any activation and thus
not wanted writes. If the user wants to use md or lvm with the option
set, all md or lvm devices have to be manually found and activated.
nomdlvm is only implemented as boot commandline option and does not use
the YAML config file. The reason is that the udev rules are evaluated
before sysrescue-configuration.lua is run, so the YAML config is not
ready yet. Moving nomdlvm after sysrescue-configuration.lua would be
an invasive operation and modify the activation order of all md and lvm
devices for all cases, increasing the probability of regressions.
Also udev rules offer a direct access to boot commandline options, making
implementation straightforward and robust.
The dns library used by lua requires /etc/hosts to exist, otherwise all
requests for name resolution are denied. This meant that using the
sysrescuecfg boot option with a http URL and hostname did not work
while using an IP worked.
This patch adds an empty /etc/hosts file to the initramfs image to fix this.
Initializing the pacman key database during boot can take considerable time
and there is no locking during this time against concurrent file access.
This can lead to problems when installing packages soon after reboot.
This also speeds up the boot process.
Additional disk space requirement is about 1 MByte.
Fixes#290
glibc recently changed how dns name resolution is implemented. It now
needs additional .so files that are loaded dynamically. Include these
files in the initramfs image.
Firefox doesn't use the system CA database but has it's own. Use the
policies.json file to let Firefox trust the entries from the
sysconfig.ca-trust of the YAML config too.
There is no dependency on NetworkManager being actually online when
sysrescue-initialize.py calls load-srm to honor the late_load_srm config
option. So without this patch this can fail when the network takes a
few seconds until the link is actually up.
Fixes#288
syslinux: this is already installed, but only through a dependency.
syslinux is essential to build a bootable image. So this should be
explicitly listed and not just as a dependency.
fatresize (10 KB): allows to resize FAT filesystems. Helpful for
example when you have to grow a EFI System Partition because it
ran out of space.
kexec-tools (70 KB): allows to directly boot into a given kernel +
initramfs without going through the BIOS or bootloader before.
Useful when the bootloader is broken, you can't immediately fix
it but want to boot the original system.
When the lua script parses the YAML config, it converts a `1` to `1.0` because in
lua all numbers are floats. So it writes out `1.0`, which is then loaded by the
python scripts later. Make the type conversion for booleans aware of this.
This allows to write something like `ar_disable: 1` in the YAML and have it
acted upon as expected.
