Petitboot ignores enabled autoload?

[Fredrik Noring]

Hi Sam,

> The kboot parser in Petitboot sees very few users, and it looks like you've
> stumbled across a bug. The parser should try to set a default option, but
> when this was originally written the default keyword was put in the
> kboot_ignored_names struct :)

Oh, I see. I tried to gather the recommended formats from the manual pages,
but found none, so I chose kboot since it appeared to be the simplest. I
considered plowing through the Petitboot source code to find out how it
works. Since LUKS, keymaps, etc. do not seem to be supported by Petitboot,
I considered replacing it altogether with Busybox, scripts, etc. which I
need to setup to obtain a functional boot process anyway.

Another small glitch (which I haven't investigated) is that Petitboot seems
to assume a 80x25 terminal, at least through the obmc-console-client. The
"resize" command in the shell resolves this issue.

> A patch is incoming shortly to update that; in the meantime if you're looking
> for a straightforward format for your boot config the syslinux or yaboot
> parsers are both easy to hand-craft.

Thanks! The yaboot format works fine.

> Aha, yes I heard tell of people doing installs via a chroot. Most users stick
> with booting into an installer, but there's no reason this shouldn't work.
> You're safest bet would be to
> a) Turn off dm-snapshots with
> 	nvram --update-config "petitboot,snapshots?=false"
>    and reboot.
> b) In the shell stop the discover server, eg with
> 	/etc/init.d/S15pb-discover stop
> 
> Then you should be left alone.

Nice! I noted that if one restarts the discover server with

 	/etc/init.d/S15pb-discover start

it will (invisibly) start the autoload countdown in the background, and
then forcibly terminate the shell with kexec. This is quite unexpected.

> Right, the pb-event interface isn't the most user friendly - it's essentially
> a debug tool to fire off messages to the pb-discover process. There some
> improvements to be made there; in the meantime you'll either have to be
> careful with the naming, or if snapshots are turned off via the above command
> you don't need to sync changes back.

Turning off snapshots is by far the most useful and least surprise option
for me. :)

Fredrik