On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 02:37:14 -0600, Gain Paolo Mureddu <gmureddu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Reg Clemens wrote: > > >What is the item 'Red Hat nash' that prints in the (early) boot > >seqence right after the 'Audit( ... )' line. There's a manpage for nash: man nash You can think of it like a little mini shell. It interprets special script files at the very beginning of the boot process while the kernel is still trying to get all its pieces (modules, etc) bootstrapped. Nash is what runs much of the stuff that's configured in your initrd file. If you've ever looked at the grub bootloader configuration you'll have seen that there are two files that are referenced at the time the boot first starts: the kernel executable itself, and a corresponding initrd file. The initrd file is really just a packaged filesystem (which in FC2 and earlier was a true ext2-formatted bytestream, and in FC3 is a cpio archive). The initrd gets "mounted" into memory and is the initial RAM disk (hence the name initrd). Among the most important things in the initrd are the various kernel modules which are needed, like SCSI drivers, etc.; before your actual disk-based filesystems (including /) can even be accessed and mounted. Well, nash is the interpreter which does all this initialization and loading of modules in their correct order, etc. I suspect you're probably asking about nash because you see it mentioned during the boot and it may appear to take a long time. Nash itself is trivial and really doesn't take any time at all---it's similar to starting say the bash shell, only even much simpler. However it's what nash is invoking, such as loading some initial kernel modules. That's usually what takes time as some of those modules do things like scan all your hardware for devices, etc. Nash normally runs in silent mode, so you don't get any feedback. However it is possible to hack your initrd to tell get nash to print out what it's busy doing. All this is in the "mkinitrd" RPM package. You can download the corresponding src.rpm file to get the source. -- Deron Meranda
