On Mon, 2013-12-09 at 20:33 -0500, Rich Freeman wrote: > On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 2:56 PM, Rick "Zero_Chaos" Farina > <zeroch...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > I really don't like the idea of having no networking in the stage3 by > > default, however, I'm becoming more open minded on what qualifies as > > networking. What I'm wrestling with is this, what if I want to slap a > > stage3 on a device and then access it from the network? > > Hit your head on the wall because it doesn't contain a kernel? > Stage3s in general aren't functional systems.
You're thinking with your x86/amd64 hat on here. An ARM device can be booted with the kernel over networking (or even via usb, as is the case with most Android devices) and rootfs on local storage. Just because x86/amd64 doesn't do it, doesn't mean others can't/don't. What exactly is missing from a stage3 aside from a kernel? At this point on most ARM devices, it goes like this: extract stage3 edit inittab (and if needed) securetty create net.eth0 & symlink it to the default runlevel, along with openssh(assuming headless system) copy your kernel & modules into their proper places (if needed) put sdcard into arm device, watch it magically boot and work What you're proposing is: extract stage3 install qemu (assuming you don't have it yet) mount dev/proc chroot emerge a-network-manager <go get coffee, have a beer, make a three course meal> set password (might as well, since you're chrooted) vim inittab <oh wait, no vim, right, gotta run nano> nano inittab (and if needed) securetty exit chroot unmount dev/proc copy kernel & momdules to their proper places put sdcard into arm device, watch it magically boot and work Why exactly is the latter one better? the emerge a-network-manager step would be far faster on the device itself, even the RPi. I plan to look into the SUSE Qemu fork, as they've supposedly sped it up immensely (iirc it takes about a week to build gcc according to armin76 for aarch64) but even then, that would be a hack as their patches may or may not have been sent upstream - and they may be aarch64 specific and arm could still be slow as balls. So remember, just because your laptop/desktop can't do awesome stuff, doesn't mean other devices can't :)
