From owner-freebsd-multimedia  Sun Aug 30 12:39:54 1998
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From: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
Message-Id: <199808301743.TAA06919@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
Subject: Re: How to PnP without booting -c?gy
To: freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG
Date: Sun, 30 Aug 1998 19:43:15 +0200 (MET DST)
In-Reply-To: <199808301526.RAA05318@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de> from "Oliver Fromme" at Aug 30, 98 05:26:04 pm
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> _once_, to enter the pnp data.  After that, the box should boot
> straight through when powered on (unattended).  Note that it
> will not have a graphics card nor a keyboard then.
> 

unless it can save the configuration back into the kernel on the nfs
server you need to reset the pnp info all the times.

>  > and use /kernel.config (but i am not sure if at that point of the boot
>  > process in a diskless machien things can work..., i suspect not)
> 
> I did a bit of RTFS, and it seems that /kernel.config is only
> read by biosboot, not by netboot.  :-(
> (Anyone _please_ correct me if I'm wrong.)

netboot is the eprom code that only loads the kernel. I am not sure how
and when /kernel.config is read.

> That would be a nice solution indeed.  I don't have an EPROM
> burner myself, though, I might be able to find someone to do
> that for me...

not worth the effort.

> By the way -- Where is the userconfig data stored?  It seems
> like the dset utility reads it from "somewhere" (kvm?) and
> stores it directly into the kernel file.  Is this correct?

yes.

> Shouldn't it be possible to take the userconfig data (in
> particular, the PnP configuration data) and put it into a
> different kernel file?  I experimented with dset and "sysctl
> -w kern.bootfile=/kernel.new" and things like that, but it
> didn't work.

not sure because the symbol tables are also read from the new file i think.
You'd need to tel "dset" that the pnp config is in the first file, but
must be written in the second one. Or, add a couple of options to dset,
one to fetch the pnp info from one kernel, the other one to write the
previously dumped data into another kernel. Not hard at all, if you
look at the #ifdef PNP in dset.c 

> PS:  IMHO, there _should_ be a way to hardcode the PnP config
> in the kernel config file, as it's done for standard ISA
> devices, too.

You can do like this. Since a copy of the kernel config file is usually
stored into the kernel, you can patch the userconfig code so that it
scans the copy and when it finds some magic string passes it to
userconfig. I did not do that because i thought (maybe erroneously)
that the /kernel.config file was read after the system was given
control.

	cheers
	luigi

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