Re: watchdog triggered auto-rollback

[Richard Sent]

Nathan Dehnel <ncdehnel@gmail.com> writes:

> GRUB: https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/fallback.html
> GRUB supports falling back to another boot entry if the machine fails
> to boot. This could be integrated with guix so GRUB falls back to a
> previous guix system generation. This covers the case of "we can't
> start a watchdog service because the system won't boot".

How does GRUB determine a boot failed? Does it have to be something
drastic like "kernel failed to mount the initrd" or can it catch more
complex errors?

I believe that if the initrd fails during startup it will abort into an
interactive Guile REPL. This might hurt GRUB's ability to detect
something went wrong since the kernel would still be running. A similar
case may apply if Shepherd gets stuck during system initialization.

-- 
Take it easy,
Richard Sent
Making my computer weirder one commit at a time.