When I type cat /proc/cmdline I see a repair=1 parameter, but I can’t find any reference to this parameter in kernel-parameters.txt (in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/).
Does anyone know what this parameter does, and why its there?
(openSUSE 11.1)
Couldn’t find it anywhere in the kernel docs.
In my system (11.0):
~> cat /proc/cmdline
root=/dev/disk/by-id/<long disk name here> resume=/dev/sda1 splash=silent vga=0x31a
the last two being the grub standard boot parameters. I’d speculate at some time a script (or user) tried to start your system in some kind of repair mode with this.
You could try to comment it out in the grub config file /boot/grub/menu.lst and see if makes any difference, perhaps by monitoring the boot message logs.
Not every parameter that is passed through the kernel cmdline is for the kernel. So it may not be described in kernel documentation. Boot loaders are free to pass anything down that might be used to influence operation later. As you saw, user programs can look at the cmdline via /proc/cmdline and decide to do or not do something. So you may have to look at boot scripts, or even any user program that might read /proc/cmdline.