[Discuss] Running things from initramfs

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

grg wrote: 
> On Fri, Mar 05, 2021 at 09:07:56PM -0500, Dale R. Worley wrote:
> > I have an Oracle Linux (a Red Hat derivative) computer and I'd like to
> > run "xfs_repair /dev/mapper/ol-root". The problem of course
> > is that partition is the root partition and xfs_repair can't operate
> > on a partition that's mounted.  If I could boot off a CD, it would be
> > simple, but since this computer is remote, that's hard to do.
 
> more likely than the above, assuming you have a swap partition, you could
> temporarily cannibalize it and put a root there.  as long as you have
> enough ram to do what you're doing (a few gb for this temporary usage?),
> things run fine without swap.

This is an excellent idea. You should not run out of memory
under normal conditions, and especially not when you are just
running an emergency environment and fsck.

-dsr-