From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Feb 6 21: 0:51 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from valen.gwi.net (valen.gwi.net [207.5.128.33]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 36B7837B423 for ; Wed, 6 Feb 2002 21:00:49 -0800 (PST) Received: from ABERRATION (dieselgeek.outofspec.com [207.5.188.11]) by valen.gwi.net (8.11.6/8.11.6) with SMTP id g1750gr18214; Thu, 7 Feb 2002 00:00:42 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <000201c1af94$63125150$fa01a8c0@ABERRATION> Reply-To: "Predius" From: "Predius" To: "Dan Nelson" Cc: References: <004f01c1af64$cf5eee20$fa01a8c0@ABERRATION> <20020206233947.GN1066@dan.emsphone.com> Subject: Re: Diskless USB Issue Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 23:53:00 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I've played around with this a bit, and so far on my other test systems, as long as I don't do anything beyond basic booting, ie load a mem manager, device drivers, etc, it seems to work pretty well. Near as I can tell the problem I'm running up against is in the initilization of the mii section of my nic. As a test I tried an older Kawasaki based USB nic, which only does 10baseT, half duplex. It's detected, gets link, and attempts to netboot. Problem is the kawasaki chipset is flakier than all hell, so it randomly starts timing out durring the process. Best so far is bootp's completed, nfs has mounted root, and it's begun to init before the nic crapped out. I've looked at the aue driver for FreeBSD, and NetBSD, hoping I could spot a difference, but unfortunatly the code is way over my head. I'm pretty sure if I can mangle it either via driver butchery or a kernel option to hardwire it for one media setting I can get it to work, I just don't have the expertise to do so myself. Joshua Coombs > I think you're lucky it even boots, since I don't think booting a kernel > after DOS has has its hand on the system has been supported since > 2.2.something. > > If that CF card really must be a FAT FS, I believe both the Grub > bootloader and /boot/loader can run on FAT, so you should be able to > boot straight into FreeBSD without using DOS (have grub load > /boot/loader which in turn loads the kernel). > > -- > Dan Nelson > dnelson@allantgroup.com > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message