[PATCH] - allow specification of alternate inittab files

[B Thomas]

Well, you might think so, and perhaps there is some avenue that I haven't
explored.  I ended up in situations in which a given inittab just wouldn't
do the trick and only a different inittab would. For example, what serial
lines are started and how.  In the end, no amount of scripting seemed to
help. Only a separate inittab.

My vague memories of the issue (I solved this some time ago and am only now
getting around to submitting the change), is that serial lines were a
prominent pain.  Some systems would start them, others would just error over
and over and over (the serial line didn't exist, for instance). A lot of
experimenting with all of the different knobs (boot command options,
inittab, scripts, etc) ended up with no real answer and only frustration.
Each system and configuration had its own unique combination of
requirements. A simple, to the point, change was to simply allow the
specification of the inittab that you wish to be using.

A second scenario is, say, for an environment in which you want no serial
input, but want a debug option. A simple approach is a default inittab with
no serial lines, and a debug version with serial lines and shells.

Overall, inittab is a very simple, sane, usable solution. This patch very
simply allows you a choice to provide some flexibility and builds upon the
existing mechanism.  As you point out, there are many other choices. This
was one, low-cost, incredibly simple to implement one that I happened to put
together.

thanks,
-b


On 11/1/06, Jason Schoon <floydpink at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 11/1/06, B Thomas <bjthomas3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Yeah... that was stupid.  Let's try again with a much smaller, much
> > improved version. Thanks for pointing out the obvious silliness in the
> > original patch.
> >
> > -b
>
>
> Is this really something that busybox init should be handling?  There is
> nothing saying you have to use the init out of busybox to start your
> system.  Init could simply be a shell script or C application that you
> write.
>
> In that case, especially in a shell script, it would be trivial to look
> for a command line parameter specifying the inittab (or any other config
> file, there is no requirement that you have to use /etc/inittab either) to
> use for that boot.
>
> At the very least, I would think this should be a config item, and it
> should be wrapped in the existing inittab config item.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/attachments/20061101/3dee4455/attachment-0001.htm