On Nov 30, 2007 9:40 AM, Dave Miner <Dave.Miner at sun.com> wrote: > 3. Our design space for the problem needs to consider the WAN > installation case (which likely doesn't use DHCP at all as a > configuration delivery mechanism) as a primary requirement.
If I get it right the following are strategic directions that are decided: - grub on x86 for disk or network - zfs boot on sparc - wanboot for network on sparc All of technologies above work best if a miniroot is used. For the sake of consistency (less testing, customer mistakes, etc.) has any thought gone into adapting grub to have a wanboot personality? Phase 1 would be to download wanboot configuration files and do the right thing with them. Phase 2 could be to bring in the crypto support if there is justification[1]. Then end users and the community could work out simple tools that can generate appropriate jumpstart configurations for anything that runs Solaris. Special cases are limited to the disk and network boot loader code that may be in firmware or a downloaded program. 1. Justification here is iffy because x86 hardware tends to only support PXE for network booting which means that you are getting untrustworthy information before wanboot functionaity starts to run. Untrustworthy information includes DHCP response and downloaded boot program (grub) because the typical BIOS and boot ROMs only implement DHCP and TFTP. Wouldn't it be nice if x86 server makers included an alternative BIOS that implemented IEEE 1275-1994? Presumably NVRAM is cheap enough that having both a traditional BIOS and OpenFirmware on the system and giving the customer the choice as to which one to use would be quite feasible. -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/
