ginit

I 100% blame Mr Ellis for this..

What is this?

Good question .. to understand this, we need to understand the boot process!

The Linux Boot process

tl;dr Once a kernel "sorts out" the hardware it does one last thing and that is to start process 1, which is 🥁 ... the init process!

Note: if this init process unexpectedly dies (without telling the kernel to reboot or power off), then you'll get a kernel panic! So don't attempt to kill init PEOPLE!

[   10.032969] ---[ end Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! exitcode=0x00000200 ]---

The job of init is to set up the Linux environment by doing the following:

1. Creating a virtual filesystem
2. Mounting various devices
3. Mounting root filesystems
4. Perhaps do some networking
5. Make a lovely brew
6. Start another process, that may start others (such as systemd)
7. Then wait to be told to power off or reboot etc.. but never die!

ginit

The ginit is actually a few things.. but the main part is some go code that will execute as /init and set up the environment for you.. in most cases it will then drop to a busybox shell. There is where you can modify it to do what ever you like!

Creating everyting!

The ginit.sh script will build the code/busybox and create a initrd container image, it will then extract the initrd.tar.gz to the local filesystem for you. It will also grab you a local copy of the latest Ubuntu Kernel.

Creating a disk image from a container!

The image2disk.sh <name:tag> script will pull a docker image and convert it to a raw disk you can then start with ginit etc..

Starting

qemu-system-x86_64 -nographic \
  -kernel ./linux \
  -append "entrypoint=/docker-entrypoint.sh root=/dev/sda console=ttyS0" \
  -initrd ./initramfs.cpio.gz \
  -hda ./disk.img \
  -m 1G

Note: the -append is where we pass things to be read at runtime.. the k/v entrypoint=.. is where you pass what you want to start from the disk image!

Troubleshooting..

Just cross your fingers it works first time?