Rebuild pxe initrd with dm-multipath

SUSE Product Topics SLES Install-Boot
1

I’m pxe booting IBM blades for installation with autoyast. This works, but is very slow due to the absence of a multipath driver in the initrd installation system.

How can I rebuild the initrd used for installation to include dm-multipath, so my initial boot for installation already uses multipathing ?

After installation I can just add ‘dm-multipath’ to /etc/sysconfig/kernel and run mkinitrd, but the resulting initrd is much smaller than the one provided for installation over pxe on the SLES11 DVD, so I think it will not work for that purpose.

Are the instructions on how to build such a initrd ?

Markus

2

You can create an initrd with integrated multipath-driver like this:

$ mkinitrd -f multipath

regards,

3

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4

[QUOTE=amo_vzug;5110]You can create an initrd with integrated multipath-driver like this:

$ mkinitrd -f multipath

regards,[/QUOTE]

Yes, but this recreates the standard initrd, which goes into /boot to boot the local system.

I’m talking about the initrd used for booting and installing via pxe, residing in /tftboot on the pxe install server. How to I build/rebuild that one ?

5

In the meantime I’ve found that I can unpack the initrd with cpio and can potentially modify it that way. But it looks to me like 5t is not using a standard init system to start up, there is no inittab or init files started at boot. I do not see where I can add the modprobe command to load the dm-multipath module and start the multipathd during boot.