Deron Meranda wrote:
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.
Is there a *simple* way to get nash to print out what it's doing?
--
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Gustavo Seabra - Graduate Student
Chemistry Department
Kansas State University
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If at first you don't succeed...
...skydiving is not for you.
