Proposals

Dracut as a general purpose Bootloader

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Early Boot and Init Systems
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One Line Summary

A proposal for an EFI like boot mechanism with a dracut initramfs and the linux kernel using kexec to boot other linux kernels.

Abstract

A small dracut image can boot other kernels and images, as soon as it is brought up with a linux kernel by coreboot or a simple bootloader loading from an EFI like partition. This mechanism spares the implementation of all kinds of filesystems in bootloaders and reduces image boot time by not using BIOS int 13h. The TUI/GUI for the bootloader can be written using ncurses or framebuffer, because we are already in linux. /boot is mounted and can hold configuration and fallback state data.

Tags

dracut initramfs boot loader grub kexec

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Speaker

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    Harald Hoyer

    Biography

    Harald Hoyer joined the Linux community in 1996. His first kernel patch was the module ip_masq_quake in 1997, followed by boot support for md raid devices. He joined Red Hat in July of 1999, working on projects ranging from udev, network daemons and CD recording packages to creating configuration tools, extending smolt and writing python interfaces. Lately he created a cross distribution initramfs generator called dracut.