✎ soc:2009:pravin:journal:week6

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====== week - 6 ======

Targets decided for this week are
  * Add fedora live CD to BKO
  * Improve the user facing page of BKO
  * Improve the boot time menu

===== 29 - 30 July =====
  - Started to work on Fedora live CD
  - Collected all basic stuff needed 
     - Live CD
     - Initrd and kernel
     - Kernel modules for networking
  - It has taken unreasonably long time as fedora_11 lives cd was exceptionally slow on qemu for me, I couldn't get needed kernel modules from inside CD.
     - I decided to migrate to kvm for better performance. but I was getting error ''could not open /dev/kvm: No such file or directory''
     - After breaking my head around for some time, it seems my brand new laptop does not have support for virtualization :-(
     - For time being, I am using virtual-box, it works fast enough, but only problem with virtualBox is, virtual machine does not pick up the IP address using DHCP as it happens with qemu '' -net user'' option.  This means that my all gpxe scripts which do use dhcp by default will not work any more :-(
     - I have not yet fixed this problem of dhcp support in virtualbox, I have postponed the solution finding for this problem for time being.
  

===== 1 - 2 July =====
  - Wrote script which can generate new modified initramfs automatically with everything added from original initramfs.
  - Now, actual work of understanding /init script and understanding how they use iso image as root starts.
  - Done with modifications in /sbin/real-init which will (hopefully) mount the httpfs partition over root.
  - Initial runs were not very promising, when tried to boot this modified fedora live cd over BKO using qemu, it dropped me in rescue shell :!:
     - There were few error messages in boot sequence
        - ''mount: only root can do that''
        - ''getKernelCmdLine: failed to open /proc/cmdline: No such file or directory''
        - ''creating initial /dev : only root can do that''



===== 3 July =====
  - Pin-pointed the cause 
     - when I tried command ''mount -t proc proc /proc'' It gave error saying ''mount: only root can do that''
     - But as this command is executed from within initrd, it is executed as root, so How can I get that error :?:
     - With tip from AndyTim, it seemed that the initrd was created by non-root user, so even if those commands are executed by root, they don't have root privilages. 
        - It is strange in many ways, as initrd by non-root user works fine for ubuntu and other distributions I have tried.
        - I suspect that selinux security policies are enforcing these extra rules as fedora is having selinux in enforcing mode.
        - Anyways, creating initrd by root user does make sense in some ways. So, I will follow this for all distributions.
   - The booting process has progressed, but now it is stuck at some other point. It just hangs without giving me rescue shell
   - I don't even know if it has used httpfs, all my ''echo'' messages are lost in fast scrolling output of qemu, and I am not able to scroll back and see, what was happening. I need to find some way to be able to see previous outputs. of qemu. I miss that feature seriously in qemu.

===== 4 July =====
  - I will need one of the two things to be able to do debugging properly for problem in hand.
     - Scrolling support for qemu (so that I can see old outputs and my debug messages )
     - dhcp support in virtual box (<del>I presume that it is having some kind of scrolling support</del> I tested and ''ALT+PG_UP'' does some scrolling up )
  - Started my day with trying to find how to scroll in qemu, but nothing promising came out.
  - Both of above ways are time consuming, so I have resolved to use one odd method, taking screen-shots and then checking the old messages, only thing I can say about this method is that, it gets my job done.
  - Now, coming back to the problem, I will log the progress with Red Hat [[Fedora11BKO|Here]]
Trace: • pravin • week11 • week11 • usb_gpxe_design • dverkamp • dverkamp • week12 • project_plan
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