[arch-general] Failover to LTS in the Arch boot processt?

[Aaron Griffin]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 11:31 AM, David C. Rankin
<drankinatty at suddenlinkmail.com> wrote:
> Guys,
>
> I'm curious. Since there is now an LTS kernel, has anyone thought about adding
> a few lines of code to the Arch boot process that would provide for automatic
> failover to the LTS kernel in the event the normal kernel failed to load
> during the boot process. The thought is to provide redundancy for servers in
> the case where the regular kernel becomes corrupt (for whatever reason, disk
> problem, etc...) and a reboot is forced (exhausted UPS, etc..)
>
> I don't know what it would take or if it is doable. I had just envisioned
> adding a trap that catches the failure of the regular kernel to boot, checks
> for the presence of the LTS kernel, and if installed boots the LTS kernel in
> this case.
>
> I haven't looked deep enough into the Arch boot process to know if it is
> feasible, but it just seemed like a good bit of extra protection that Arch
> could provide for server installs where the server operates on the regular
> kernel but also has LTS installed as a backup.
>
> I'll leave it to the gurus to consider. If it's not doable or not worth doing,
> then just consider it another of my stray thoughts worthy of the DEL key ;-)

You can't do something like this beyond the bootloader. Once anything
has started at boot, you have chosen a kernel and cannot go back.

I think, however, grub has something to do this