I need some info on using the append= line in lilo.conf to designate the root filesystem for an image.

I am wanting to boot gentoo which I am building in my current partition.

RedHat 8 may have the line I need to use if someone has it installed, and can check their lilo.conf. Or if anyone else knows the syntax.

I think it's something like this

append="rootfs=LABEL /"

I will use this to tell the kernel to use /mnt/gentoo as my rootfs

Thanks.

presuambly you are referring to the option root=LABEL=/ which uses the ext2 label ratehr than the partition, in the same way as in fstab you can replace /dev/hda1 with LABEL=root or whatever. Don't quite think that this is what you're after though

yea I think it's close.

That looks like the fstab entries I have seen. It seems to me that a lilo.conf file I saw had rootfs= in the append line for the given image section.

Gotta finish building the monster first then I will try it.

Thanks

The following is predicated on the assumption that I know what
you are asking for, which could be false.

It almost (*) sounds like you've built gentoo in some directory
under your current system (say /gentoo), and would like to use
that as your root to the filesystem.
*: Almost, except that you say you want /mnt/gentoo, which is
usually used for mounting removable media or "temporary"
partitions. If it's the latter, then you can probably use the
standard lilo.conf kernel image block:
According to the latest documentation I could find (2001,
/usr/doc/Linux-HOWTOs/BootPrompt-HOWTO on Slack 8.1),
there is no rootfs= boot parameter to the kernel. The root= option
for the kernel sets the root filesystem that the kernel uses while
booting (see Bootdisk-HOWTO for some info on how to mess
with this). This is not necessarily the final root filesystem to use
when the system is loaded and ready for users.

I can't think of a way (off hand) of using LILO to specify a
partition by its label (i.e. like the /etc/fstab syntax) rather than its
device name.

I believe that, unless you do funky chroot stuff, you need to
have the root of the filesystem be a partition, not a subdir of the
root dir on the partition. (This sentence doesn't really make sense
to me right now, maybe I'll edit it later.)

I think there is another way. I could rdev the kernel. I think the rootfs can be set this way to a folder.

I did not want to do that as this is just a temporary setup.

I'm having a little bit of trouble understanding exactly what you want.

You can use lilo to chroot to a directory before installing the boot loader,
effectively setting /mnt/gentoo as the root partition, but it doesn't tell
LILO to use /mnt/gentoo as its root device. LILO does pretty much
everything rdev does (albiet, temporarily) except mess with the RAM disk.
rdev ("root device") deals with devices, not directories.

You can use initrd to set up an initial RAM disk, which is what many
distros use for their boot disks. This should allow you to mount
/mnt/gentoo, chroot to it, and set that as your root filesystem. . .

yes, I think chroot is the only way to do it.

I finished building the gentoo system, and decided to go ahead and move it to / replacing the other system I had. I was going to try it out for a while first. I really don't want to have more than one linux system on the machine anyway. There always seems to be one that never gets used.

I was using chroot to build the system, and booted the kernel once I got it built and chrooted into the file system. The gentoo filesystem uses devfs and the other did not.
I was thinking for some reason there should be another way other than chroot. I guess there's not though.


Thanks for the help.

I'm off to finish building the perfect kernel.