Just recently Petitboot added a method to ask the user for a password before allowing certain actions to proceed. Underneath the covers this is checking against the root password, but the UI "pop-up" asking for the password is relatively generic. Something else which has been on the to-do list for a while is support for mounting encrpyted partitions, but there wasn't a good way to retrieve the password for them - until now!| sthbrx.github.io
Quite often when building small Linux images having separate user accounts isn't always at the top of the list of things to include. Petitboot is no different; the most common operations like mounting disks, configuring interfaces, and calling kexec all require root and Petitboot generally only exists long enough to boot into the next thing, so why not run it all as root?| sthbrx.github.io
On platforms that support it Petitboot can interact with the inband IPMI interface to pull information from the BMC. One particularly useful example of this is the "Get System Boot Options" command which we use to implement boot "overrides". By setting parameter 5 of the command a user can remotely force Petitboot to boot from only one class of device or disable autoboot completely. This is great for automation or debug purposes, but since it can only specify device types like "disk" or "netw...| sthbrx.github.io
A neat piece of kernel code dropped into my lap recently, and as a way of| sthbrx.github.io