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).
Upstart requires /dev/ptmx since its 1.4, and will lock up in case of it missing.
I was hitting this in the fuloong, where I don't use the nixos initrd.
svn path=/nixos/trunk/; revision=34429
