Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE DESKTOP 10 SP2 - DEPLOYMENT GUIDE 08-05-2008 Deployment Manual page 408

Managing RAID and LVM Setups
If you configured your system to hold the root file system under RAID or LVM,
init sets up LVM or RAID to enable access to the root file system later. Find infor-
mation about RAID in
information about LVM in
formation about EVMS and special storage settings in Storage Administration
Guide.
Managing Network Configuration
If you configured your system to use a network-mounted root file system (mounted
via NFS), init must make sure that the proper network drivers are loaded and that
they are set up to allow access to the root file system.
When init is called during the initial boot as part of the installation process, its tasks
differ from those mentioned earlier:
Finding the Installation Medium
As you start the installation process, your machine loads an installation kernel and
a special initrd with the YaST installer from the installation medium. The YaST
installer, which is run in a RAM file system, needs to have information about the
location of the installation medium to access it and install the operating system.
Initiating Hardware Recognition and Loading Appropriate Kernel Modules
As mentioned in
a minimum set of drivers that can be used with most hardware configurations. init
starts an initial hardware scanning process that determines the set of drivers suitable
for your hardware configuration. The names of the modules needed for the boot
process are written to INITRD_MODULES in /etc/sysconfig/kernel.
These names are used to generate a custom initramfs that is needed to boot the
system. If the modules are not needed for boot but for coldplug, the modules are
written to /etc/sysconfig/hardware/hwconfig-*. All devices that are
described with configuration files in this directory are initialized in the boot process.
Loading the Installation System or Rescue System
As soon as the hardware has been properly recognized, the appropriate drivers have
been loaded, and udev has created the device special files, init starts the installation
system, which contains the actual YaST installer, or the rescue system.
Starting YaST
Finally, init starts YaST, which starts package installation and system configuration.
392 Deployment Guide
Section 7.2, "Soft RAID Configuration"
Section 7.1, "LVM Configuration"
Section 17.1.1, "initramfs"
(page 113). Find
(page 107). Find in-
(page 390), the boot process starts with