[BusyBox] making some progress with "minit", but "genext2fs" is the villain now

[Robert P. J. Day]

  ok, things are looking better.  based on glenn mcgrath's previous
advice, i updated the snippet of code in the kernel source tree in
init/main.c to properly pass the executable name to execve() and, sure
enough, minit is being invoked properly.  sadly, there's another problem,
but this one i've isolated to some extent.

  after booting my system with 

  boot: ... init=/sbin/minit

i verify that minit is being started, but it dies almost immediately
with:

  minit: could not open /etc/minit/in or /etc/minit/out

not knowing what it was trying to open, i downloaded a sample /etc/minit
directory from www.fefe.de/minit/ and, right there in /etc/minit, there
were two named pipes, /etc/minit/{in,out}.  all the docs i'd read never
mentioned those but the sample directory suggested pretty strongly that
they needed to be there, so i did a couple "mkfifo"s and added them to the
root filesystem that's used as the basis for the downloadable and bootable
image.

  booted again -- same error.  hmmm ... boot again with regular init,
and notice that the FIFOs are missing.  track it down to the "genext2fs"
utility, which didn't copy them over and, more to the point, it doesn't
look like it's capable of doing that.

  while genext2fs supports a "spec" file that lets you list which device
files you want to add to the resulting filesystem that genext2fs is
building for you, the source suggests it can handle only "d", "b" and "c"
files.  no "p".  (this is in the add2fs_from_file() routine in 
genext2fs.c).

  so, at this point, i'm kind of stuck, not knowing how to cram those 
FIFOs into the root filesystem via "genext2fs" so i can build my 
downloadable image.  dang.

rday