maintboot

maintboot runs commands outside of the current OS, with exclusive access to the system and hardware.

This can be useful to run maintenance tasks, like repartitioning, in a controlled environment.

Maintboot builds an appliance on the fly from a list of packages (using supermin). It then loads the appliance with kexec, bypassing the bios, and runs the maintenance script in that new context.

Usage

Write an initscript

maintboot --pkgs pkg1 pkg2 --initscript init

Most things are left to the initscript, like parsing the kernel commandline (may need some kind of encoding) and choosing to either reboot or shutdown after maintenance.