Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1999 23:54:03 +0000 (GMT) From: Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com> To: "Eric L. Hernes" <erich@lodgenet.com> Cc: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>, Doug Ambrisko <ambrisko@whistle.com>, current@FreeBSD.ORG, erich@jake.lodgenet.com.demon.co.uk Subject: Re: netboot & ELF kernels Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.01.9901142352140.17826-100000@herring.nlsystems.com> In-Reply-To: <199901141510.JAA86132@jake.lodgenet.com>
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On Thu, 14 Jan 1999, Eric L. Hernes wrote: > Luigi Rizzo writes: > >> > >A few comments on netboot. Recently, erich@lodgenet.com > >contributed netboot support for "fxp" cards. The msg was posted on some > >freebsd list about 1 month ago, and the file to look for is "nbfxp.tgz". > > > >Again, better than nothing, although it does not support ELF i think. > > > > Yea, that's right, although it's the netboot infrastructure, not the > fxp specifics (obviously). I talked to Mike Smith on the future of > netbooting when the 3-stage boot was still in early developoment. There > is some code in the new 3rd stage that looks like it's there for netboot; > but I'm not sure whether it's functional or not. It works well on the alpha. To make life easy, the SRM firmware has good support for low level networking. > > I was kind of figuring that the current bootroms would get the 3rd stage > boot loader, which would in turn fetch the real kernel. > > Supporting any card that has a FreeBSD driver isn't that tough, you don't > really need programming specs other than the driver source (although > it is nice). Tricker is actually burning the flash image. > > >Having tried both the tftp and nfs method, i prefer the latter a lot > >because it means i don't have to cnfigure another service (TFTP) on the > >server: with the current FreeBSD's netboot, you can supply all > >parameters with bootp (which you'd need anyways -- or replace it with > >DHCP i guess) and download the kernel with NFS (which your server > >probably already has). > > I'd have to agree with the bootp/nfs scheme. I use NFS enough that I'm > somewhat familiar with the errors it gives; but everytime something > goes wrong with tftp, I end up groveling through the man-pages and > tcpdump ;-) On the alpha, the firmware uses tftp to load the loader and that uses dhcp and NFS to load the kernel. -- Doug Rabson Mail: dfr@nlsystems.com Nonlinear Systems Ltd. Phone: +44 181 442 9037 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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