pivot_root alternative

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From: Salvatore De Paolis
Date: Sunday, June 24, 2007 - 2:27 pm

hi all

i built the kernel with a busybox initramfs which runs from a usb stick. While
i boot i need to mount the real root and i'm using pivot_root.
Pivot_root . old-root return to me an "Invalid argument" error and googling i
found here http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/10/8/17 that pivot_root should be avoided.
I want to ask now what i should do to switch to a real root?

Regards
S.
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From: Jan Engelhardt
Date: Sunday, June 24, 2007 - 2:29 pm

use run-init from klibc?


	Jan
-- 
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From: Arnd Hannemann
Date: Sunday, June 24, 2007 - 2:39 pm

However be aware of the limitation of run-init:
It only works for direct childs of root directory
/mnt/newroot won't work
/newroot should work ;-)

Good luck,
Arnd
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From: Salvatore De Paolis
Date: Sunday, June 24, 2007 - 3:08 pm

On Sun, 24 Jun 2007 23:39:25 +0200

Thank you both, i'll take a look at run-init:)
Nice to know about the child limitation but i just have to find klibc-utils
inside buildroot or busybox if even exists:)

Regards
S.
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From: Michael Tokarev
Date: Monday, June 25, 2007 - 3:19 am

By the way, busybox now includes similar applet,
named switch_root.

/mjt
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From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Sunday, June 24, 2007 - 8:59 pm

Hm, that should probably be fixed.  It should be able to work on any
directory as long as there isn't another *filesystem* involved...

	-hpa
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From: Kyle Moffett
Date: Sunday, June 24, 2007 - 4:29 pm

One interesting fact about the mount() syscall is this: when  
overmounting a directory tree, a process whose current working  
directory is within said directory tree will see the old vfsmounts  
until it does an absolute chdir().  Shells tend not to be terribly  
useful for this because they use absolute paths more than necessary,  
but I think you can make it work.  For instance, if you run these  
commands after mounting the root filesystem:

mount -t proc proc /realroot/proc
cd /
mount --move /realroot /
find /proc/$$/cwd/ -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -print0 \
		| xargs -0 rm -rf -- '{}' ';'
cd /

This will set up proc on the new root filesystem, move /realroot to  
the root directory, and delete the contents of the old initramfs  
using the old current-working-directory link of your shell.  The  
amusing thing is that you are using the "find" and "rm" commands from  
the newly mounted root filesystem to remove the contents of the  
completely hidden initramfs.  The only reason it's actually possible  
is because you have the tenuous thread of the working directory.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett

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From: Salvatore De Paolis
Date: Sunday, June 24, 2007 - 10:04 pm

So i choice to use switch_root which is already inside the busybox but with a
bit(?) of unluck cause it still wont run.

It hangs on !S_ISREG(st1.st_mode)

Can you explain to me how to interpret it?

Regards
S.
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Previous thread: Re: [AppArmor 39/45] AppArmor: Profile loading and manipulation, pathname matching by David Wagner on Sunday, June 24, 2007 - 2:20 pm. (1 message)

Next thread: [PATCH -mm] PM: Prevent frozen user mode helpers from failing the freezing of tasks by Rafael J. Wysocki on Sunday, June 24, 2007 - 2:36 pm. (1 message)