[gentoo-releng] Call for developers for livecds / catalyst

[Brad House]

Hi,
We've made a lot of progress on livecds in the past couple of weeks.
Catalyst is now able to build all steps minus the actual  mkisofs
call, which I have provided a x86-isogen.sh  script to assist those
people who are not familiar with mkisofs.  This script works for both
x86 and amd64, and should be called from _within_ the cdroot directory
of the livecd stage3 (and will create a gentoo.iso in the parent directory).

The good news is the cd boots, gets through the initrd which mounts the
loopback filesystem that catalyst creates, and execs  /sbin/init which
starts up the standard gentoo boot process.  But what happens after that
is the scripts that are part of baselayout are not properly detecting
that we're booting a livecd, so we get oddities:

1) It tries to run fsck on our  tmpfs  filesystem which is where the
root is mounted, obviously this should not be done :/  It obviously
fails, and you have to hit  CTRL-D to continue the boot process.

2) (after fsck stuff) You'll see a lot of error messages about it trying
to write to /lib.  The reasons for these failures is /lib is a symlink
back to the /lib directory of the _readonly_ loopback filesystem, so
it can not be written to.   I do not believe whatever is trying to write
to /lib is necessary, so it may be able to be commented out.  If it does
prove to be something necessary, let me know, as I'll have to rework some
of the way the initrd works, as it's what populates the tmpfs rw (read/write)
filesystem, and I'll have to probably copy rather than symlink the /lib
dir.

3) It does not auto-login, you get a root prompt, but no root password
is set.  I assume we need to provide a proper mingetty, and autogen
a random root password.

Also, please note that a lot of these scripts may also be able to use
the $CDBOOT  variable, and the reason for the failures is that that variable
is not set in the environment.  We need to have something at the beginning
of the boot process parses the kernel command line  /proc/cmdline  and looks
for  'cdroot'  if it exists, then export the $CDBOOT  variable (please note
cdRoot vs cdBoot)

We need volunteers to help out, I am limited on time, and so is drobbins.
Hand it to drobbins though, he's devoted a lot of time to getting catalyst
up and running, what's left is totally outside the scope of catalyst.

Please reply to this e-mail if you have time to devote to this.

Also, please note, you may need to KEYWORD  genkernel-3.0.1_beta4 for
your arch if it is not already (keyword it as STABLE, otherwise catalyst
won't use it).  _beta4 is the only working genkernel release for livecds.

Thank you very much!

-Brad

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