Prior to genkernel 3.0.1_betaX i was able to add "single" to the kernel arguments to force booting into single user mode. This is a pretty significant feature for sysadmins that nearly all Unix systems support (some way to boot into single user mode). With the new genkernel I can't seem to find a way to do this. I think the scripts need to take this into account and send it to init when the real root is used.
do you know how the previous one did this? in what way to do pass it to init ?
The normal way initrd works without pivot_root is that /linuxrc is executing on the ramdisk. After this is finished, the Linux kernel automatically executes /sbin/init with the appropriate kernel arguments passed to it. It uses the root=/dev/xxx parameter to determine where to execute /sbin/init. (code to see what happens is all located in [kernel-source-dir]/init/main.c. genkernel's /linuxrc explicitly calls exec /sbin/init (with no arguments). This is bypassing the kernel automatically executing /sbin/init. With pivot_root it's a bit harder to let the kernel automatically load /sbin/init [arguments] because root= isn't set to the real root, but perhaps genkernel's linuxrc should parse out arguments to send to init and pass them in manually. The algorithm that the linux kernel uses is parse_options(char) in init/main.c.
Oh yeah, I'm actually relatively busy right now with work and don't have timeto much with genkernel, but if I find some free time I'll submit a patch against linuxrc which should parse out arguments to send to init.
ok, I'm passing the results of `cat /proc/cmdline` to /sbin/init now hopefully that will provide what you're looking for. this is in _beta10
