From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <199907112116.QAA23835@www2.tuckeris.com> Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 16:03:54 -0500 Subject: Netbooting Linux on an iMac From: "Charles A. Jolley" To: linuxppc-dev@lists.linuxppc.org Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Sender: owner-linuxppc-dev@lists.linuxppc.org List-Id: Hi all: Has anyone gotten LinuxPPC to net-boot using OF? It doesn't look as if this should be a big deal if we know the format that OF expects the kernel boot image to be in. A compiled-in ramdisk with the root filesystem that contains enough data to mount other NFS filesystems (like /usr, /home, /etc, etc...) should be enough to handle the diskless nature of things, right? I suppose one other issue that would need to be dealt with would be creating separate /etc, /var, /tmp, and /usr/local filesystems for each machine and then making sure that the kernel mounts the right one...but this doesn't seems to be insurmountable either. The machine could be identified using kernel args passed from firmware which is then used by scripts to mount the right system. That way, a simple utility could be created that involves booting off of a CD (maybe into the MacOS since Linux can do that yet) and running a utility where you identify the machine. The utility would then configure OF to netboot and pass the appropriate kernel args. Talk about easy configuration... Forgive my creative rant here but to facilitate faster development times, I intend to make the kernel I am developing for my company here netboot, so if I can figure it out for that, then I think it would be just be a short step to accomplishing the above under Linux as well... -Charles [[ This message was sent via the linuxppc-dev mailing list. Replies are ]] [[ not forced back to the list, so be sure to Cc linuxppc-dev if your ]] [[ reply is of general interest. Please check http://lists.linuxppc.org/ ]] [[ and http://www.linuxppc.org/ for useful information before posting. ]]