Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 09:29:51 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug Ambrisko <ambrisko@whistle.com> To: hohmuth@innocent.com (Michael Hohmuth) Cc: luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it, ambrisko@whistle.com, tege@matematik.su.se, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Netboot Message-ID: <199808261629.JAA24376@whistle.com> In-Reply-To: <87hfz010ph.fsf@olymp.sax.de> from Michael Hohmuth at "Aug 26, 98 12:44:58 pm"
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Michael Hohmuth writes: | Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> writes: | | > a few questions to those who have looked at this code: | > 1) which cards does etherboot support ? | | The same cards that Netboot also supports, plus the Intel EtherExpress | card. .. and more from http://www.slug.org.au/etherboot/: However NIC support is limited to NE2000s/NE1000s (and PCI versions), some Western Digital/SMD cards (80x3, 8216, 8416), a few 3Com cards (3c503, 3c507, 3c509), Lance based cards (such as the NE2100, NI6510 and PCI versions), the NI5210, the Crystal Semiconductor CS89X0 and the Intel Etherexpress Pro Note the "Netboot" project http://www.han.de/~gero/netboot.html supports packet drivers so more NIC's can be used. The main author of Etherboot is starting on a project that would use Linux NIC drivers called Nilo. | > 2) how hard would it be to make etherboot compilable under FreeBSD ? | | You would have to duplicate some of Linux's /usr/include/linux header | files. Technically we should remove the Linux kernel PCI code. Stephan has offered to help. Then we should be able to nuke the Linux includes. | > 3) what "nice features" are you referring to except the 100Mbit | > support ? about last 1yr ago we managed to make netboot get all | > of its data from bootpd without having the annoying TFTP | > configuration file -- that was in my opinion a significant | > improvement. | | I don't know what Doug referred to here, but what do you have against | TFTP? First I hate the TFTP file. It is annoying as Luigi said. I'm netbooting some FreeBSD boxes via ISC's dhcpd. I can put all configuration info in the dhcpd.conf. It's simplier for me. Of course this is my opinion. Features that I like: - Being able to configure a boot menu to solect what mode to boot (ie. pick 1 for FreeBSD, 2 for Linux, 3 for Floppy). Also you can specify a default and timeout. - Booting a device which can be a floppy or hard disk partition. - Boot an netboot rom image. This is good for testing a change to a netboot rom image without burning or writting to a floppy. - Minor but nice, is a rom loader that can be prepended to a rom and dd'ed to a floppy. - Booting "Netboot" stuff from the "Netboot" project such as floppy image booter. - Uses TFTP to load the kernel instead of NFS. This is useful for netbooting off a box that doesn't have NFS. What use is this? Well we use it here for installation and some tools. We make a netboot image that has a built in MFS so it doesn't need swap or root via NFS. This also means the same dhcpd config can be trivially used for a bunch of machines. (Also the way the DEC/Alpha does netboot via BOOTP & TFTP). - Does BOOTP extended options. Not sure about how it works but it permits further options to be passed that exceed the initial packet length by sending them in another packet. One problem I have is that the Etherboot code is that when the option to boot from a hard disk partion, Win98 will fail. This also occured when you selected not to boot from network. This has been fixed in the FreeBSD version so I pulled over the patches for Etherboot and now it works. My patches are on the "Etherboot" web site. I also fixed a couple of buffer copy issues that truncated the bootp packet. However I have not been able to fix the boot from a partition option. I assume the problem is similar to the "do not netboot" option but I don't know enough about booting a hard-drive yet. It would be nice if all this work could converge into a more unified effort. However, I doubt it. Atleast the cross-pollination has improved things. Currently that I know off we have: - NetBSD netboot - FreeBSD netboot - Netboot - Etherboot - Grub (soon) - Commercial netboot roms (which by the way are becoming standard on a lot of PC's shipped with a NIC such as Dell/Gateway) also Intel has published a spec on them here's some info on an annoucement from to the netboot mailing list. From: Marc VUILLEUMIER STUCKELBERG Linux loader for PXE (NetPCs) We ported BpBatch, the tools described in the Linux Remote-boot mini-Howto, to Intel Preboot Execution Environment (PXE). That means, you can now use it with most onboard bootproms to load Linux, to manage disk images and to authenticate users at boot time. To our knowledge, PXE bootproms providers are Intel, Incom and Lanworks (eg. 3com). We hope that NILO will soon be PXE-compliant so that we get free Linux NetPC ! For more informations about PXE, read http://www.intel.com/managedpc/ For more informations about bpbatch, see http://cuiwww.unige.ch/info/pc/remote-boot/ It seems we could get a big bang for the buck by making a loader for the Commercial rom's or PXE compliant to boot the various OS's. It would also be nice to make a "free" commercial compatable rom. This way Dell etc. would ship FreeBSD or whatever netboot'able machines. Installation via netboot are cool. The entire installation and network setup can be automated making installation trivial and we get around the 1.4M boot floppy restriction. We commonly boot a 3.5M MFS kernel to do our automated installs. Doug A. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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