HOWTO: Fedora Core 3 stock kernel and EVMS initrd

From: Matthew Mastracci
Date: June 4, 2005

I spend a couple of hours today trying to get EVMS working with a stock 
Fedora Core 3 kernel and EVMS's initrd.  My goal was to get a 
fully-managed EVMS system so that I can skip the bdclaim patch every 
time I upgrade the kernel.

To get the proper device support for booting (since the root device is 
read-only), I needed to mount a tmpfs directory for the proper system's 
/dev/.  This seems to work fine for the most part, but causes some 
selinux errors in minilog if you have selinux's targeted policy enabled- 
not sure why.  I disabled selinux and the messages went away.

Here's the basics of what I had to do.  This assumes that you are 
running the same kernel you will be booting:

1.  Mount the EVMS initrd as loopback under /tmp/initrd-loop.
2.  Delete the /sbin/modprobe symlink from the EVMS initrd.
3.  Copy modprobe from the Fedora system's /sbin to the /sbin directory 
    in the initrd
4.  Create a /lib/modules/`uname -r` directory in the initrd
5.  Copy /lib/modules/`uname -r`/drivers/md/*  from the root filesystem 
    to the initrd
6.  Run "depmod -b /tmp/initrd-loop" to get the proper modprobe data files
7.  In the "load modules" section of linuxrc, add "modprobe dm-mod"
8.  Add the following lines to linuxrc, just before "Pivot-root to 
    /sysroot":

# Mount a new tmpfs filesystem on the new system's /dev/ directory
mount -t tmpfs none /sysroot/dev

# Copy the evms and console devices to the new directory
cp -a /dev/* /sysroot/dev/

Once you've got that set up, everything should work fine.

Matt.