Re: netboot

Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> On Tuesday 28 December 2004 18:14, Andrew Gaffney wrote:
> 
>>>I think the best option is still to persue the use of NFSROOT, it's
>>>widely used on other platforms (think Solaris' Jumpstart). Just put some
>>>more effort in that, you're not quitters are you?
>>
>>I'm well aware that it wasn't a joke on his part, but the point is that
>>parted works on more architectures than fdisk does. I'm attempting to get
>>sparc netboot/nfsroot working on my sparc32 right now.
> 
> What about ramfs/tmpfs as root and downloading whatever is needed to that. It 
> could be nfs, but just as well be ftp or whatever. (Of course that is still 
> not a solution low memory systems)

Right, it needs to be a more universal solution. I was talking more about this 
with ciaranm today. I finally got it out of him that the only *real* reason he 
thinks a nfsroot won't work is because of the incompatabilities between NFS on 
2.4 and 2.6, the differences between NFS hosted on Linux and NFS hosted on 
Solaris/other *NIX, etc.

He gave me a few other reasons. He said that users wouldn't be able to set up 
the nfsroot. My reply was that if they can follow the directions to netboot a 
sparc, they can follow a few more directions to unpack a tarball and set up NFS 
on the server.

He also mentioned the difficulty of putting together a NFS root. I managed to 
get a "working" nfsroot system from a stage3 tarball in ~30 minutes, and that's 
with no previous experience doing it. We (and/or the arch teams) could put 
together a usable nfsroot environment containing the installer and its 
dependencies, so the users wouldn't need to do this.

-- 
Andrew Gaffney
Gentoo Linux Developer
Installer Project