I'm not any good at perl, and I only came up with this after many
slow attempts. Any review welcome.
But until this, memtest was broken, and extraPrepareConfig as well, in grub.
kernel 3.4+ needs cifs-utils to mount CIFS filesystems.
the kernel itself (and busybox's cifs mount code) are no longer able
to do this in some/most cases and will error out saying:
"CIFS VFS: connecting to DFS root not implemented yet"
Nixos' qemu-vm target is hurt by this, as it wants to mount /nix/store
via cifs very early in the boot process.
This commit makes sure the initrd for affected kernels is built with
cifs-utils if needed.
As non-QWERTY keyboards don't feel so warm and cozy if they hug QWERTY LUKS
password prompts, it was on honor for me to serve King Dvorak XV to fight the
glorious keyboard war against... what?! Yes, I'm awake!
We're fighting with loadkeys to spit out busybox binary keymaps against loadkmap
(loadkeys does have a special target -b for that).
And yep, I'm somewhat abusing preLVMCommands, if someone got issues with that,
feel free to introduce a new substitute in stage-i-init.sh.
Sent from my iPhone
We had a "mount -o remount,rw none /" that was setting back 'relatime',
although we had set 'noatime' at initrd mount. Removing the word 'none' fixed
it.
Specifying a device (in this case 'none'), makes mount to forget previous
device options. According to manpage, it says not to read fstab or mtab. But the
effect is that of setting 'relatime', if it was mounted 'noatime.
- Renamed system.build.menuBuilder to system.build.installBootLoader.
- ‘install-grub.pl’ (formerly grub-menu-builder.pl) now generates the
GRUB menu *and* installs GRUB (if necessary).
- ‘switch-to-configuration.sh’ has no boot loader specific knowledge
anymore. It just calls installBootLoader.
The old GRUB menu builder script is quite slow, typically taking
several seconds. This is a real annoyance since it's run every time
you switch to a new configuration. Therefore this patch replaces the
Bash script with a much faster Perl script. In a VirtualBox test, the
execution time went from 2.7s to 0.1s. The Perl version is also more
correct because it uses XML to get the GRUB configuration (through
builtins.toXML), so there are no shell escaping issues.
The new script currently lacks support for subconfigurations defined
through "nesting.children".
BusyBox doesn't handle the "auto" filesystem type very well: fsck will
just ignore such filesystems, and mount will only work properly if the
required kernel module is already loaded. Therefore, use blkid to
determine the filesystem type.
Also generate an /etc/fstab in the initrd rootfs on the fly. This is
useful if you're dropped into an emergency shell since it allows you
to say "fsck /dev/sda1" or "mount /dev/sda" and have the right thing
happen.
Using BusyBox instead of Bash plus a bunch of other tools gives us a
much more feature-full, yet smaller initrd. In particular, BusyBox
contains networking commands such as ip and a DHCP client, useful for
NFS boots. It's also much more convenient for rescue situations
because the shell has builtin readline support and there are many more
tools (including vi).
