Re: Can you MOP boot an install kernel directly?

On Mon, 4 Aug 2025 at 18:09, Paul Koning <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > On Aug 4, 2025, at 12:36 PM, Jason Thorpe <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >> On Aug 4, 2025, at 7:45 AM, Johnny Billquist <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>
> >> I'll just top-post to be lazy.
> >>
> >> First of all, as you know, MOP is the "native" way to netboot DEC machines from back in the day. And MOP sortof fills the place of both DHCP and TFTP in one. But it's more targeted for the explicit need of netbooting and remote management. But in a sense, for VAXen, it would be great if we had the possibility of getting all the netbooting though MOP and not need DHCP and TFTP. Not sure if that is possible, though.
> >
> > Can MOP supply the IP address to the system?  If not, you're not going to be eliminating DHCP (or BOOTP).
>
> MOP has a "parameter load" message that can supply a couple of things, such as the system DECnet node address.  But there is no parameter code for IP address, unfortunately.  Not even in the Phase V version of MOP.

<pointlessDiversion>
Is the parameter load data consistently available to a loaded MOP
image, and do boot roms safely ignore unknown parameter types?

If the answer to both was yes....

Given that the parameter load data can contain an arbitrary number of
parameter type messages, each type message including a type byte, a
length and some data... and that the type message contains a (byte)
type (of which only 0...6 are used?) it should be easy enough to take
one of the unused values and return a chunk of data defining whatever
we wanted... :)

Of course we then need to have the mop server interact with some
server side IP allocation service to get the data to send across in
the MOP response... so this would be something akin to travelling to
the moon and back to avoid entering a given intermediate airspace
</pointlessDiversion>

David