shutdown busybox and start another PID1 process

[James Bowlin]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 07:35 PM, Harald Becker said:
> Did I get it right?

This is very close to what I'm doing now.  The two changes are:

  1) I boot into Debian so I switch_root into their /sbin/init
     and I use "telinit u" to get back pid 1.

  2) I copy busybox et al. into the new root before switching
     so I don't need to unpack.  I suppose unpacking is slightly
     safer but I have things I need to communicate to the booted
     systems anyway.  This is partly a holdover from Knoppix
     design I started with that used symlinks instead of a
     switch_root.  Then I moved to bind mounts which were much
     better but eventually a few programs were unhappy with them
     so I ended up with the switch_root and I copied the BB stuff
     over so programs on the booted system that I communicated to
     didn't need to be changed.

     I also like the consistency of having my busybox stuff almost
     always under /live even though I have to copy things around
     to make it so.

BTW: I wrote a space invaders game in busybox-shell, although I
cheated a little and wrote a tiny C program called getch that
gives me non-blocking input.  Maybe there is already a way to
do that built in.  If not, a getch applet might be very handy.
It is a small thing but it is all that is needed to write
truly interactive scripts with just busybox.  IMO it would
open the door to some really neat things.


Peace, James