COMP 3000 Lab 4 2010

All of the following should be done with an Ubuntu 10.04 distribution or equivalent. We recommend experimenting in a virtual environment because some of the exercises could make your system unbootable. (In fact, take a snapshot of your working system before starting these exercises so you can easily revert.)

Questions

1. Change the grub command line at boot to limit the total available RAM to 256M. You'll need to get to select an entry and edit it from within grub.
2. Add a new grub menu item which limits the standard kernel to 256M.
3. Add a second virtual disk and make it bootable: put the kernel and initial ram disk on it and then install grub. Can you boot off of this disk? What does it do?
4. Mount the standard kernel's initial ram disk (initrd). What program is first run in this environment? What does it do?
5. What programs does upstart start on boot?

Hints

Please add your hints below to help your fellow students!

mounting RAM disks

• You'll need to use a loopback mount: mount -o loop <device> <mountpoint>