[arch-general] Reboot - Versioned Kernel Installs

[C Anthony Risinger]

2011/6/9 Joe(theWordy)Philbrook <jtwdyp at ttlc.net>:
>
> This is the kind of thing that caused me to become a ‘multi-Linux distribution’,
> ‘multi-boot’ kind of guy in the first place. When an upgrade «or my own
> dumb mistakes» break my system I like being able to simply reboot something
> else and finish anything I'm working on before I spend hours, or days, or
> even weeks just trying to figure out what broke...
>
> It's not likely that anything other than a hardware failure will shut down
> Arch AND Ubuntu AND PCLinuxOS AND OpenSuSE all at the same time... And for
> that I still have a laptop...
>
> But it would sure be nice to be able to keep using my favorite distro with
> a fallback kernel instead of having to boot one of the others. But I do
> have to agree that more than one fully functional old kernel is a bad
> idea. Though I don't have much trouble manually deleting the really old ones
> from Ubuntu's /boot dir...

what if we (optionally) stored the original images _inside_ the new
one?  the new/bad kernel would boot, and via some bootloader entry eg.
kernel param the new initcpio script would kexec the old kernel, with
another (different) kernel param ... when the old kernel booted it
would load the exact same initramfs image, except it would use an
alternate tree, ie. instead of /init it would chroot to /previous and
run /previous/init ...

you could store as many of these "old" images as you liked, but it
would look like one -- i don't see any technical problems off-hand at
least, and i *think* it would only require minor changes to
mkinitcpio, and would be unobtrusive to other tools.

does this sound genius or completely insane?  some insanely genius guy
once said they are only separated by a fine line ...

C Anthony