Boot options

Boot options

• there is a lot of boot options!
  • 47
• cover a lot of ground
• you should always use the inst prefix for the Anaconda options on the boot command line
  • so that the options don't collide with options parsed by kernel, Dracut, systemd, etc.
• the same options can be in most cases also used when running Anaconda as an application
  • usually during installation to an image/directory or in a live environment
  • but we still usually call them "boot options" for historic reasons

Learning about your (boot) options

• Anaconda boot options are documented in the RHEL & Fedora docs
  • https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/23/html/Installation_Guide/chap-anaconda-boot-options.html
  • https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/Installation_Guide/chap-anaconda-boot-options.html
• the upstream boot option documentation is part of the Anaconda project
  • https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/blob/master/docs/boot-options.rst
• if you have Anaconda installed you can just use the --help option to get option descriptions:
  • anaconda --help

What options we use the most

ks - use the given kickstart file for the installation

updates - use an updates image

stage2 - use this stage2 image

text - run the installation in text mode

resolution - set the screen resolution

lang - set language (so that Anaconda does not ask about it ;-) )

debug - log debugging messages

vnc, vncconnect & vncpassword - run VNC server during the installation

Image creation

image - specification of disk image file to be used as installation destination

dirinstall - use the device mounted at /mnt/sysimage as the installation destination

The dirinstall and image options are mutually exclusive.

The more exotic stuff

kexec - reboot the system using kexec with the new kernel and initrd

syslog & remotelog - remote logging from the installation

noverifyssl - don't verify SSL certificates

geoloc - configure geolocation usage

rescue - start rescue mode

memcheck & nomemcheck - check/don't check if the system has enough RAM for installation

extlinux - use extlinux as bootloader