[Clfs-dev] Boot Method rather than chroot steps of the Cross-LFS book

[Ron McDowell]

On 8/13/12 3:53 PM, William Harrington wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
>
> Been working on the boot method of the book, but mostly with powerpc 
> for now.
>
> I've come across some issues we need to discuss.
>
> When we boot, it is a very minimal system. Really, only the extra 
> program installed is VIM.
> We tell the user to build a minimal kernel to mount the rootfs and 
> that is about it, and to not include audio and all that jazz. That is 
> fine.
>
> Although, I think the user may need network access. For example, maybe 
> they want to build the system by running an openssh daemon in the 
> booted temp system. That is fine. Since we install minimal boot 
> scripts, the kernel can use ip autolevel configuration via dhcp, rarp, 
> or some other method or the user can pass the kernel paramaters of the 
> boot line to configure the network, and not even use bootscripts, 
> don't need to install iproute2 in the temp system before booting. I 
> think that may be the best way and we would not need to install 
> ethernet configuration programs for the boot method.
>
> Next up, we discourage the use of modules for the boot method, but if 
> someone does and they decide to compress them for whatever reason, 
> kmod will not load them as xz and zlib aren't enabled by default. We 
> can enable those options for kmod during the boot method section and 
> that will fix that. I know we want to keep the boot method minimal, 
> and I want to know what the community has to say about the above 
> issues I am raising.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> William Harrington

This is very timely to me as I've just finished up my CLFS-embedded for 
the Mini2440 and want to go on to building the full OS.  I'd see doing 
it as a minimal kernel, and "oh, if you need to have compressed modules, 
also do this after step 5.12, that after 6.8, and finally something else 
after 8.3."

I planned on adding telnetd early-on to avoid having to cross-build 
libssl too early in the game...security isn't much of an issue on my 
in-house network.

-- 
Ron McDowell
San Antonio TX