Re: [gentoo-catalyst] changing inittab

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Thu, 2007-08-02 at 19:01 -0500, Andrew Gaffney wrote:
> Joshua Hoblitt wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 05:26:03PM -0700, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> >> Normally, yes, it would only be good for kernel output, but as someone
> >> else mentioned, you have livecd-functions.sh that re-writes the inittab.
> >> Well, guess what triggers it?  That's right, a "console=" option on the
> >> command line.  If you type (or via catalyst, add) console=something,
> >> livecd-functions.sh (via functions.sh in baselayout) will interpret it
> >> and modify inittab accordingly before we ever even hit runlevel 3, so it
> >> starts a console on that serial line for login.
> >
> > So I tried setting 'livecd/bootargs: console=ttyS0,115200' in
> > installcd-stage2-minimal.spec and indeed it does setup a tty on the
> > serial line.  However, it doesn't actually seem to pass "bootargs" to
> > the kernel or there is some other wierdness going on as the dmesg
> > information AND all of the sysvinit output remains only on the vga
> > console.  The last output on the fbconsole is some wierd error message
> > about bootsplash right before attaching a tty to the serial line.  This
> > is an improvement for me but I would really like to see the kernel
> > output/etc. so I can see if the boot processes has hung.
>
> You're positive that it's not being passed to the kernel? I'm pretty sure that
> livecd-tools would read it from /proc/cmdline, which is the arguments passed to
> the kernel. If it shows up in /proc/cmdline, then it's the kernel that isn't
> honoring it, not catalyst/genkernel/isolinux that is doing something wrong.

I think it is an ordering issue, rather than it not being passed.  I
just checked the code and the splash code appends to the very end of the
kernel command line, meaning it takes precedence.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Council Member/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation