Copy vmlinuz and friends

[xerxes2]

So I finally got around to write my own installer for Cauldron, been thinking about doing it for years. I have a perfectly working basesystem-minimal now but there is one problem I can't really figure out. I'm only using systemd-boot as bootloader and it only supports fat32 so I mount a fat32 boot partition right onto /boot. I found out that the kernel wants to make symlinks to vmlinuz and its friends in /boot but afaik fat32 doesn't support symlinks. What I want is that /boot/vmlinuz should always load the latest installed kernel. Looking at the kernel builsdscripts gives clues atleast. It first runs the (old) script installkernel and after that tries to make symlinks. But this must be fixable somehow??

https://svnweb.mageia.org/packages/caul ... 8102#l1714

[doktor5000]

systemd-boot is a UEFI bootmanager so this is basically only for /boot/EFI which must be a FAT filesystem.
But kernel and initrd are not located in /boot/EFI so I don't really understand your question.

It might help if you would add some context information what your installer should actually do, or what your use case is.

If you really want to write your own installer it would probably be a good idea to base it on some versatile framework, as e.g. https://calamares.io/

[xerxes2]

Systemd-boot only supports fat32 that is why I mount the boot partition at /boot. But fat32 does not support symlinks so Mageias default kernel install doesn't work.

Installer works fine, except for that the symlink to /boot/vmlinuz dosn't work because it's fat32. This is a kernel package problem which I haven't figured out how to solve yet. Now the installer just makes a copy of the vmlinuz but it should not be needed if the kernel package supported this or if there exist some other setting that fixes the problem. Look at /usr/sbin/installkernel but I don't think the kernel package supports it anyway because the symlinks are hardcoded in the kernel buildscript.

[xerxes2]

Ok so I managed to somehow solve this problem but it's ugly. By appending this line to /etc/sysconfig/installkernel , /boot/vmlinuz is a copy of the latest installed kernel.

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cp "/boot/vmlinuz-${1}" /boot/vmlinuz

But that is ugly and I would like to have something like this instead in /etc/sysconfig/installkernel .

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# 0 for no copies/symlinks, 1 for copies, 2 for symlinks
USECOPY=1

And then add something like this in /sbin/installkernel.

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if [ $USECOPY = 1 ]; then
  echo "Make copies in /boot"
  cp vmlinuz-${1} vmlinuz-${2}
  cp vmlinuz-${1} vmlinuz
  if [ -e initrd-${1}.img ]; then
    cp initrd-${1}.img initrd-${2}.img
    cp initrd-${1}.img initrd.img
  fi
elif [ $USECOPY = 2 ]; then
  echo "Make symlinks in /boot"
  ln -sf vmlinuz-${1} vmlinuz-${2}
  ln -sf vmlinuz-${1} vmlinuz
  if [ -e initrd-${1}.img ]; then
    ln -sf initrd-${1}.img initrd-${2}.img
    ln -sf initrd-${1}.img initrd.img
  fi
fi

And force the kernel to actually use that script for all symlinking and copying in /boot.

[xerxes2]

Was it a good idea? Yesterday I was going to suggest an option for choosing to use initrd or not like this.

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# 0 for no initrd, 1 for generating initrd
USEINITRD=1

But today I found out that it already exists. It's just a bit hidden. But it's possible to use NOINITRD option in /etc/sysconfig/installkernel already. Tried it and it works.