Netbooting Linux on an iMac

Netbooting Linux on an iMac

[Charles A. Jolley]

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

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Re: Netbooting Linux on an iMac

[David Edelsohn]

	Please look in the archive of this mailinglist where you will find
a detailed answer from me about exactly what an OpenFirmware boot image
must look like to be recognized and loaded.  It basically is a 32-bit
PowerPC ELF image with a special NOTE section and the loader section in
the header referencing the NOTE section.

David

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Re: Netbooting Linux on an iMac

[puetzk6715]

If you do get some kernels that OF accepts, please tell the rest of the
world how! I don't wanna have to you MacOS just to load Linux on my next
machine (fake toddler tantrum)...

I would be about ready to go Linux-only if it weren't for that
uncertainty. I can OF-boot my current beige G3, but... doesn't look
hopeful. Net box may have to be something else... darn, mac-on-linux
with VPC has such I high cool hack value (if I could figure out why VPC
thinks I've mis-installed it).

On Sun, 11 Jul 1999, David Edelsohn wrote:

> 
> 	Please look in the archive of this mailinglist where you will find
> a detailed answer from me about exactly what an OpenFirmware boot image
> must look like to be recognized and loaded.  It basically is a 32-bit
> PowerPC ELF image with a special NOTE section and the loader section in
> the header referencing the NOTE section.
> 
> David

> 


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