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
* Change the name of the top-level derivation from "system" to
"nixos-<version>".
* Show the NixOS version in the GRUB boot menu instead of the kernel
version.
svn path=/nixos/trunk/; revision=33785
* Load scsi_wait_scan after all other kernel modules to ensure that
all SCSI device nodes have been created.
* Increase the timeout for the appearance of the root device to 20
seconds.
* Do a "udevadm settle" just after the root device has appeared to
make sure that udev isn't accessing the device anymore (hopefully).
On EC2 (Xen), I've seen fsck on the root fail randomly with "device
in use" errors.
svn path=/nixos/trunk/; revision=33650
* Add a slash to the end of $MODULE_DIR, as expected by depmod. (Not
that running depmod from the command line is all that useful, since
you can't use it to update the tree in the Nix store. But at least
commands like "depmod -n" work now.) Reported by Kirill Elagin on
IRC.
svn path=/nixos/trunk/; revision=33312
USR1 signal before it has forked into the background (because it
will be in the start/running state immediately).
svn path=/nixos/trunk/; revision=33288
