Re: Can you MOP boot an install kernel directly?

On 8/5/25 00:52, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> On 2025-08-04 19:26, Perry Metzger wrote:
>> On 8/4/25 12:36, Jason Thorpe 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 
>>> goingto be eliminating DHCP (or BOOTP).
>>
>> Certainly, but it's nice not to have to load boot blocks that then 
>> just load the kernel if you can just load the kernel in one step. The 
>> OS will use dhclient to get its address.
>
> I'm starting to suspect you don't understand the full process of the 
> booting.

I wrote one version of the x86 boot blocks.

>
> The boot block is a really simple piece of code that resides in the 
> first block(s) of a disk, and the sole purpose of that code is to read 
> in the /boot image.

We're not talking about disk booting here at all.

Perry