Re: [PATCH] use initmpfs even if there's root= cmdline
From: Rob Landley
Date: Sun Dec 22 2013 - 23:49:55 EST
On 12/18/13 20:35, Dave Young wrote:
On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 11:51:30AM -0600, Rob Landley wrote:
On 12/12/13 20:38, Dave Young wrote:
On 12/12/13 at 05:25pm, Dave Young wrote:
Current code use ramfs instead of tmpfs for stub when root= defined.
But for real use case with initramfs, usually there's like cmdline like
root=UUID=$UUID the root dev is the real device. For that case we have
no way to use initmpfs, thus this patch removes the limitation so tmpfs
can benefit more people.
The reason I did that was if you specify a root= then you don't want
to _stay_ on rootfs. You specify root= so either the kernel does
switch_root for you, or so rootfs does a swich_root at the end.
The point of initmpfs is that when rootfs _is_ the "real" root
device, it can benefit from being tmpfs. When you're just goign to
switch to a different root device, tmpfs doesn't make much
difference.
The reason make sense to most of users. Thanks for the info.
For Fedora kdump initramfs there's different requirement though, we do the
vmcore capturing in ramfs with root=, the root= is not necessay in most of
the cases because we will reboot immediately after vmcore capturing finish.
There's one potential exception is that we could switch to real root in
case of capturing failure. Another thing is we use dracut to create initramfs
and dracut has a limitation that root= is a must-have param.
Interesting use case.
I can't do anything about dracut. (Otherwise userspace could look at
ROOT= which is not parsed by existing kernel code to have a special
meaning...)
Discussed with Vivek Goyal about the kdump use case, I missed one thing that
tmpfs has default size limit though we can tune it.
So I will think more about it, will address this later, please ignore this
patch.
I have a vague todo item of feeding rootflags= through to initmpfs,
but that's really intended to specify flags for root=. There isn't
really an existing command line option to specify initramfs flags
because ramfs doesn't care.
It was one of those "only parse rootflags= for initmpfs when there's
no root=" vs "create a new rdrootflags= ala rdinit= even though
that's a subtly wrong name these days..." and it went on the todo
list because neither approach was obviously superior.
Happy to take suggestions and whip up a patch if this is
inconveniencing somebody. :)
It would be great that initmpfs can use the whole memory on demand by default at
the same time we can avoid the deadlock mentioned about OOM handler.
Except that if initmpfs size=100% uses all the memory, we're back to
"fill up the filesystem and the kernel deadlocks" same as initramfs.
Possibly I could tell it to go to 100% during extract and then remount
to 50% afterwards? (The cpio archive filling up memory is pilot error. I
wonder what happens if tmpfs is told to remount using less space than
the filesystem currently has, does it fail or does it adjust the amount
to what's currently used, or...?)
If necessary I could query the filesystem size after extract and remount
to that amount or 50% (whichever is greater), but this is getting more
complicated than seems strictly necessary? (If rootflags= got passed
through we'd then want to only do this if they _didn't_ specify a size,
or else have the "actual size or size= the user passed"...)
Implementing behavior is easy. Determing what the correct behavior
should be is hard.
For this purpose no need for extra flags? For other flags maybe "initmpfsflags="?
You can already say rootfstype=ramfs if you want to drop back to a
filesystem that doesn't care about size checks. I could trivially make
it so rootfstype=tmpfs overrides the root= check, but then there's that
50% memory limitation on the filesystem size. (Beyond which the disk
cache reaping logic gets VERY UNHAPPY, by the way. The automatic load
balancing stuff is... touchy. Better now than it used to be, but I still
trust it about as far as I could comfortably spit out a rat. Then again
I'm generally not using systems with half a terabyte of ram, which is
what they all seem to be optimizing for these days...)
Adding initrdflags= to specify a size= other than 50% makes sense, but
you might have to modify your dracut thing to do a du on the filesystem
before packaging it and feed in the correct number of kilobytes.
If you want a different behavior than that, please explain what it
should do in a little more detail?
Thanks
Dave
Rob
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