Re: netboot

[Bean <bean123@126.com>]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 07:58:44AM +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> 
> In the wiki there's a link titled "GRUB2 netboot development" that points
> to:
> 
>   http://www.inma.ucl.ac.be/~guffens/grub2_netboot/index.html
> 
>   (broken link)
> 
> Anyone knows what did this contain?  Is there uncommitted work for network
> support there?  Who's guffens?

I found an old article on this subject:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2006-05/msg00020.html

It seems that vincent guffens has ported a glue to bind grub2 and etherboot
together. However, it's no longer maintained, and the patch is nowhere to be
found.

But porting etherboot to grub2 may not be that difficult after all, we can
use the driver from etherboot, and the glue code from Grub Legacy. The problem
is etherboot used in Grub Legacy is very old (5.0.5). The data structure has
changed a lot since then, so the glue code needs to be modified accordingly.

There is another method, that is to rely on PXE sevice. I have written a
PXE driver for grub4dos, it uses real mode service provided by PXE stack to
access remote files, for example, to load a kernel from server, uses:

kernel (pd)/vmlinuz
init (pd)/initrd

The advantage of this methid is that it doesn't rely on network card, the PXE
stack handles difference internally. The disadvantage is that the stack is
present only when booting from PXE ROM (hardware rom or software rom from
etherboot).

BTW, pxelinux also uses this method to access files.

-- 
Bean