BT4 live images

[tesserarius]

Hi all,

I've been playing around getting under the hood and customizing the BT4 live image to suit my own particular tastes. One of the things I've noticed is that BT4 comes with three different initrd images (initrd - the default, initrdfr - which doesn't mount swap partitions, and initrd800 which uses an 800x600 framebuffer).

Each of these images has only tiny differences, so I'm wondering why go to the effort of maintaining three separate images? surely whether or not to use swap could be controlled by a boot parameter in menu.lst and the script that mounts swap partitions (/scripts/casper-bottom/13swap) could be tweaked to check /proc/cmdline to decide whether or not to mount swapfs filesystems?

That would give the user the option to boot into an 800x600 framebuffer AND in forensics mode without having to roll a new initrd800fr image.

Am I missing something? is there a reason for the separate images that I'm unaware of?

[Archangel-Amael]

Am I missing something? is there a reason for the separate images that I'm unaware of?

Yes, forensics is the key word.
There are times when you do not want to mount anything or touch the "local" disks.

[whitelisted]

Yes, forensics is the key word.
There are times when you do not want to mount anything or touch the "local" disks.

No, you've missed the point.

The only difference between the initrd image and the initrdfr image is that the initrd image contains one additional script (/scripts/casper-bottom/13swap) which is used to check the local hard disk drives for swap partitions and to mount them.

All I'm suggesting is that that script be modified so that before it does anything else it first checks /proc/cmdline and if a particular boot flag is present (say, "noswap") then the script immediately exits without ever checking the attached disk drives.

It achieves the same thing (the disks aren't accessed in any way) and it eliminates the need for initrdfr.

[Archangel-Amael]

No, you've missed the point.

The only difference between the initrd image and the initrdfr image is that the initrd image contains one additional script (/scripts/casper-bottom/13swap) which is used to check the local hard disk drives for swap partitions and to mount them.

All I'm suggesting is that that script be modified so that before it does anything else it first checks /proc/cmdline and if a particular boot flag is present (say, "noswap") then the script immediately exits without ever checking the attached disk drives.

It achieves the same thing (the disks aren't accessed in any way) and it eliminates the need for initrdfr.

I would suggest that you bring that up with the dev team, also have a search around as you are not the first to bring these types of questions up.
You can find members on the irc channel.