Re: PATCH: Enable IP PNP for 2.4.4-ac8

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org> writes:

> ebiederm@xmission.com said:
> >  Since you have to set the command line anyway ip=dhcp is no extra
> > burden and it lets you use the same kernel to boot of the harddrive
> > etc.
> 
> You don't have to set the command line anyway. At least you _didn't_.

There wasn't even DHCP support before so yes you did.   As you can't
get the nfs mount point from bootp.

> ebiederm@xmission.com said:
> >  I boot diskless all of time and supporting a ramdisk is trivial.  You
> > just a have a program that slaps a kernel a ramdisk, and some command
> > line arguments into a single image, along with a touch of adapter code
> > to set the kernel parameters correctly and then boot that.
> 
> It's a PITA. Downloading a kernel by TFTP each time you make a one-line 
> change is painful enough, without having to download a ramdisk to go with 
> it.

Unless you have a slow network, it isn't bad.  I routinely download a 3MB
kerenl+RAMDISK image in under a second.  And that ramdisk is virtually
without size optimization.  It has glibc and a whole host of user
space tools.  I have gotten it down much smaller.

> And once those kernels are being built with CONFIG_BLK_DEV=n, the ramdisk 
> is going to be an even more unattractive solution.

Well I think in the CONFIG_BLK_DEV=n case it might wind up being a
ramfs or tmpfs image.  Something like a simplified version of tar.

Eric