Commit 5a704629 authored by Dan Moulding's avatar Dan Moulding Committed by akpm
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init: add "hostname" kernel parameter

The gethostname system call returns the hostname for the current machine. 
However, the kernel has no mechanism to initially set the current
machine's name in such a way as to guarantee that the first userspace
process to call gethostname will receive a meaningful result.  It relies
on some unspecified userspace process to first call sethostname before
gethostname can produce a meaningful name.

Traditionally the machine's hostname is set from userspace by the init
system.  The init system, in turn, often relies on a configuration file
(say, /etc/hostname) to provide the value that it will supply in the call
to sethostname.  Consequently, the file system containing /etc/hostname
usually must be available before the hostname will be set.  There may,
however, be earlier userspace processes that could call gethostname before
the file system containing /etc/hostname is mounted.  Such a process will
get some other, likely meaningless, name from gethostname (such as
"(none)...
parent ee56c3e8
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