Netbooting like PXE

[Benoit Guillon]

Benoit Guillon wrote:

>>>I think Nathan also had a patch to do this more fully supporting
>>>pxelinux fall through.
>>>
>>>Nathan can you send that to list and we can discuss both patches.
>>>      
>>>
>>Okay, here it is... it's very old, I doubt it applies cleanly and it's
>>probably buggy.  Enjoy :-)
>>
>>This is a combination of three patches (the first two for adding
>>prom_getproplen and ARRAY_SIZE) for getting the pxelinux config file
>>search working.
>>
>>Seems to work fine on power5.
>>    
>>
>Thanks much. It sounds much better than my little hack. The only thing I 
>think should be changed is that the default config file should be loaded 
>when the other cases fail (and not as first trial).
>
>In PXE, the 'default' file is used as fallback. In our platform the 
>default file always exists to provide a default spare kernel/initrd for 
>any diskless node not registered (that is, any node without a mac-file 
>in the /etc directory).
>
>BTW, is it planned to include such a PXE like support in a future 
>official yaboot release? It would be great. Anyway, I'll try your patch 
>ASAP.
>  
>
Sorry for the delay, I've tried the patch and it works fine on our 
platform (except that I had to adapt a bit the load_config_file since 
the patch was not really synced with 1.3.14rc1).

Another PXE feature that I think is quite interesting is the ability to 
ask for appending to the kernel arguments the mac-address from which it 
has been booted on. In the pxelinux configuration file it is specified 
by adding 'ipappend 2'. It then sets the variable BOOTIF=macfile, so 
that the initrd can determine from which interface the system booted and 
then configure it (dhcp client, etc.).

What do you think?

Regards,

-- 
Benoît Guillon                guillon at thalescomputers.fr
TRT/SML                       tel. : 33 (0)4 98 16 33 90
 
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