On Thu, 2008-01-03 at 08:30 -0600, Michael S. Zick wrote: > Group, > > A somewhat abstract question today ... > > The usual protocol for a kernel booting with an initial ramFS (early userspace); > is for the setup and whatever initialization be done in the ramFS image; > then switch_root (which removes the initial ramFS contents) to the "run time" > storage media (yea, everyone here knows that) ... > > But the size of a truly minimal VServer host image (logging, sshd, ntpd, network tables) > is not very big (target system is a mini-laptop (EeePC) with at least 0.5Gb ram) - - > Why "switch_root" for the host? > Why not just bring up the first (most likely only) user context as a vserver on the > run-time media - let the host context continue to run in ramFS? > > Technically, it looks like it should work - - > Anybody tried this sort of setup? Any practical problems encountered? > Of course, this setup would hold a few Mbytes of disk buffers out of the pool, > but the machine has a lot of ram, I don't think they would be missed. I do something very similar in my alpine linux distro. Instead of just continuing in initramfs, the init script mounts a tmpfs, finds a base installation (2-3MB) and "switch_root" to the tmpfs. From here it loads a set of packages (from usb/cdrom/cf) and configuration (from usb/floppy/cf). >From this base installation it is possible to mount disks, raid, iscsi, lvm and fire up vserver guests. In short you boot from usb/cdrom/cf, run your vserver host from tmpfs and run your guests from disks. tools are available to save your configuration to floppy/usb. http://wiki.alpinelinux.org (make sure to boot one of the vsgrsec-* kernels) -nc > > Mike