Date: Tue, 02 Nov 1999 21:15:03 -0800 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: peter.jeremy@alcatel.com.au Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: diskless boot roadmap (was:L Re: GENERIC build broken ) Message-ID: <199911030515.VAA02306@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 03 Nov 1999 16:09:25 %2B1100." <99Nov3.160403est.40416@border.alcanet.com.au>
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> On 1999-Nov-03 15:59:38 +1100, Matthew Dillon wrote: > >:Well, bootp in the kernel has to die too. > > > > Huh? And replace it with what? BOOTP is the only way to get an NFS > > root and swap. > > Sun uses reverse ARP to do this. Reverse ARP _is_ a hack, but it _is_ > an alternative to BOOTP. RARP would be a really bad move at the moment, since everyone else is using DHCP. For those that are still following, the roadmap looks like this at the moment: - On the PC, we will be following the PXE lead, since that's where the market is going. This basically involves using the PXE firmware which will talk to a PXE server to get the loader. It can also be conned into using normal DHCP. File transfer is either by MTFTP (multicast TFTP) or normal TFTP. The loader will do plain DHCP and use NFS to get the kernel straight out of the prospective root filesystem. Please don't complain about how ugly PXE is. It's the closest thing the PC world has ever seen to a sane network boot architecture. You're welcome to go work on RPL if you want some perspective. 8) - On the Alpha, diskless booting involves BOOTP/TFTP to fetch the loader. The loader will then happily use BOOTP or DHCP again (since SRM is too stupid to tell _us_ what it discovered) and NFS to read the kernel from the root filesystem. As you can see from the above, there's no call for RARP, bootparam, RPL or any other form of mumbo-jumbo. There's also no call for the kernel to do any of this work; the loader will do it all and pass it in to the kernel in a format it can use directly. What is currently missing, you ask? - The loader DHCP code needs to be written. - The kernel needs to improve the way it handles interface configuration information passed to it by the loader. - We need more PXE work done for the i386 loader. Intel are helping here a little, but I could use a couple of extra hands to get this done sooner rather than later. That's about it; we're almost there. -- \\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith \\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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