Re: Diskless booting

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2003 at 07:10:15PM +0200, M. Gerards wrote:
> I thought about this for some time. I think a initrd like filesystem might 
> solve
> it. It should have pfinet and nfs in it, other servers aswell. Is it possible
> for GNU/Hurd to load such a filesystem? GRUB has support for diskless booting,
> but the problem might be how to tell ext2fs where it can find the initrd in
> memory and if GNUMach is capable of doing that.

There is a possible way, but it has not been fully implemented.

The idea is that GRUB loads the disk image "as a module".  Then you have to
create a memory object from that in Mach's bootscript code.  That memory
object then needs to be inserted into ext2fs task, and its number be passed
on the command line.  ext2fs can then use it as its root filesystem.

This can be extended.  For example, ext2fs can be loaded dynamically, and
its libraries be passed as memobjs on the ld invocation line.
ld has some support for memory objects already, but it is #if 0'ed out and
probably doesn't work, see sysdeps/mach/hurd/dl-sysdep.c, lines 148 - 193
in _dl_sysdep_start().

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU      http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/