Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2002 12:14:15 +1030 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@attbi.com> Cc: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>, FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Interest in diskless booting? Message-ID: <20021211014415.GQ80921@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <x7smx7vwqy.mx7@localhost.localdomain> References: <20021208021835.GI96646@wantadilla.lemis.com> <mkwumkw7se.umk@localhost.localdomain> <p05200f36ba1974ec3ec8@[128.113.24.47]> <x7smx7vwqy.mx7@localhost.localdomain>
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On Monday, 9 December 2002 at 11:05:25 -0800, Gary W. Swearingen wrote:
>
> I recognize that picobsd doesn't suit everyone's needs, but probably
> most.
I'm not sure this is correct.
> IIRC, it allows any number of modifications and additions to the
> default configuration including installation of large systems on
> CDs.
Yes, but you need to build them.
> If Greg is considering the documentation of an entirely non-picobsd
> diskless scheme, I think his target audience will be much smaller
> than his original question's responses might imply.
I really think that PicoBSD is probably the least interesting of the
alternatives. On floppy, it's just too constrained to be any use. On
CD-ROM, it's frequently overkill to have crunched binaries and MFS
file systems. I've just brought up a netbooted environment on a
machine with only 64 MB memory and find:
$ df
Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
192.109.197.82:/src/nodisk/bumble 75100 52242 16850 76% /
devfs 0 0 0 100% /dev
/dev/md1c 31 0 28 1% /var
echunga:/ 5814 4317 1032 81% /echunga
echunga:/home 6329 3802 2020 65% /echunga/home
echunga:/src 75100 52242 16850 76% /src
echunga:/dump 76285 45350 24832 65% /dump
wantadilla:/ 6048 4685 878 84% /wantadilla
wantadilla:/home 30514 10680 17392 38% /wantadilla/home
/dev/md2c 62 0 57 0% /tmp
$ pstat -s
Device 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Type
$ dmesg
...
CPU: AMD-K6tm w/ multimedia extensions (233.87-MHz 586-class CPU)
Origin = "AuthenticAMD" Id = 0x562 Stepping = 2
Features=0x8001bf<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,MCE,CX8,MMX>
AMD Features=0x400<<b10>>
real memory = 67108864 (64 MB)
avail memory = 58265600 (55 MB)
In other words, I have 96 MB of MFS file system, no swap and only 64
MB of memory. That just plain can't work (and I intend to fix it
before releasing 5.0 :-). There are many other cases where MFS is not
the answer.
I personally would like to see the second CD become a live bootable
file system which would run from CD only. Currently it contains an
install kernel, which duplicates the efforts of the first CD.
> And I hope he too will help his readers choose whether they should
> read about his non-picobsd scheme or the picobsd manpage, so they
> don't have to learn the hard way.
I'll certainly do that.
Greg
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