Bug 167213

Created attachment 118310 [details]
Patch implementing rootdir option

This patch allows booting Fedora Core with all of it in a sub directory. It can
be used in the following way.

1. Create a new initrd using the --rootdir option
2. Create a new directory on the partition I called it /FC4
3. Move everything (except from FC4 and lost+found) from the root into FC4
4. Boot using the new initrd and add ROOTDIR=/sysroot/FC4 to the command line.

Probably parts of this can be done in a nicer way if a few features were added
to nash.

I should add that the purpose of this option is to allow booting multiple
installations without requiring a seperate root partition for each. My laptop
currently have FC1, FC2, and FC4 all installed on the same partition.

When moving the installation as described above it shouldn't be done from within
the running system. When I needed to move FC4 I first booted into FC2.
Eventually the installer could be modified to allow installing directly into a
sub directory.

Created attachment 134523 [details]
Implementation for FC5

Here is an improved patch for mkinitrd-5.0.32-1. I will verify if it applies to
FC6 and rawhide as well.

This report targets the FC3 or FC4 products, which have now been EOL'd.

Could you please check that it still applies to a current Fedora release, and
either update the target product or close it ?

Thanks.

Created attachment 146210 [details]
Implementation for FC6

The attached patch works with FC6. It has not been tested as thoroughly as the
FC5 version, but there are essentially no changes from the previous version.

Looks like bugzilla will not let me change status from NEEDINFO unless I write
another comment.

Created attachment 290556 [details]
Implementation for Fedora 8

I'd still like to see this feature in mainline. This feature makes it a lot
easier for me to setup systems to dualboot between different versions of
Fedora. The attached implementation for Fedora 8 is just an updated version of
the patch which has been working flawlessly since Fedora 5.

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Fedora 8 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2009-01-07. Fedora 8 is 
no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further 
security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug.

If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of 
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Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.

Created attachment 328533 [details]
For F10

I'd really rather not add this as a mkinitrd feature.  You should propose this as a feature for dracut ( development list at initramfs.org ), which we hope to move to in the future.