Date: Sun, 15 Dec 1996 09:42:23 +0100 (MET) From: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> To: phk@critter.tfs.com (Poul-Henning Kamp) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: A question on diskless boot Message-ID: <199612150842.JAA07695@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
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Hi, sorry to bother you but I posted a similar question to the mailing lists and got no answer. One of our labs has a number of machines with a network card (21140 based, if_de driver) which is unsupported by netboot. I am looking for some alternative ways to setup these machines as diskless, i.e mounting root at the very least from a remote server. It seems that other bootloader (e.g. floppy or dosboot) at the moment do not support such a behaviour. The problem, I think, is that the kernel expect the nfsdiskless structure being filled up with server parameters (collected with bootp/tftp) instead of collecting them itself using bootp, the way netboot does. Obviously you cannot get them before the network card is up and running (well you could hardwire them in the loader but that's not a reasonable option). I am willing to work on it, and would just like a bit of advice. Would it be a wise thing to try to merge into the kernel part of the code which is currently in netboot (main.c I believe) which fills up the nfsdiskless structure, so that diskless boot only requires to pass an interface name to the kernel ? That way we could probably boot diskless even with biosboot/dosboot, and this does not look like much work. Thanks Luigi -----------------------------+-------------------------------------- Luigi Rizzo | Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione email: luigi@iet.unipi.it | Universita' di Pisa tel: +39-50-568533 | via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy) fax: +39-50-568522 | http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ _____________________________|______________________________________
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