Netbooting like PXE

[Benoit Guillon]

Nathan Lynch wrote:

>Paul Nasrat wrote:
>  
>
>>On Fri, 2006-10-20 at 10:56 +0200, Benoit Guillon wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Hello,
>>>
>>>I currently use yaboot to boot diskless boards, but the booting 
>>>configuration can be different from one node to another.
>>>
>>>Thus, an interesting evolution of yaboot would be that it can grab a 
>>>configuration file whose name is built from its mac address first, and 
>>>fallback to the default yaboot.conf file if the mac-file does not exist. 
>>>It would behave like PXE clients, or like some X terminals like NCD.
>>>
>>>Please find attached a patch that implements it, just to show that the 
>>>changes are very small. I can of course send the complete source files, 
>>>but I guess that you would code it in a more clean way :-)
>>>
>>>What do you think?
>>>      
>>>
>>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.

Regards,

-- 
Benoît Guillon                guillon at thalescomputers.fr