On 01/15/10 03:10 AM, Garrett D'Amore wrote: > I'm currently looking at a problem where I might need a network device > to use a "pseudo" device of sorts (or a nexus/leaf relationship not > reflected in the PROM tree) or possibly using a device where the PPA > (network interface number) is not something that can be determined just > by looking at the device tree. (Basically, I've a situation with one PCI > function that has multiple physical ethernet ports, and I need to be > able to AI install over *both* of them.) > > Under the old NFS boot/Jumpstart, this required the PROM to tell us more > information, and there was a hand off of the device path to the newly > booted installation kernel. > > I *think* under PXE its likely that this is not needed anymore, but I'd > like confirmation. > > Will AI work with a device like this without user intervention? How does > it select the interface to use? Does it just try to DHCP on every one of > them and pick the first one that gives an acceptable answer? Does it > just use NWAM to auto select an interface? > > I'd really like to understand what requirements a NIC driver must meet, > if any, to work properly with AI. >
Network booting with PXE is still the same, we've made no changes. NWAM is explicitly not used in network booting scenarios, because we can't have it yanking interfaces out from under us on link loss. So, network/physical:default runs and has dhcpagent adopt the interface that PXE configured. That mechanism is in http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/cmd/cmd-inet/sbin/dhcpagent/adopt.c#dhcp_adopt AI only cares that it has an interface that can run IP and that is configured with sufficient routing to reach the server(s) it references :-) Dave
