On Wed, 1 Mar 2000 almesber@lrc.di.epfl.ch wrote:
> Consider what you have to do in the general case before booting:
> - pick a kernel
> - maybe pick an initrd
> - maybe obtain a command line, possibly derived from the original
> command line
> - maybe massage/reconstruct some of the boot parameters
On a cluster, if we have linuxbios (I admit that's still 'if')
- boot the kernel from NVRAM
- Kernel gets boot command line stuff via dhcp
- kernel follows orders from commmand line and either:
keeps going (it's the kernel we want)
boots from disk
boots from some other way via the net (even NFS is possible)
> The disadvantage is of course that packaging gets a little more complex
> and that your loader grows a bit (by the rd and initrd drivers, plus
> the initrd itself). Is this a problem ?
For this generation of motherboard there's a hard 1 MB limit. Also the
intel flasher software is odd about how much of that 1MB it's willing to
program, so the limit is more like 512K until Intel divulges the Secret
Bit that would let devbios write flash ram (this is hidden info on the
l440gx+, and Intel support has already told me that (1), it's secret, and
(2), they don't want to tell me the secret).
That said, long term I have no problem with the user-mode approach, but in
terms of what we need here the direct kernel approach is probably more
useful.
ron
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