On Sun, 2006-12-03 at 07:02 +0100, Willy Tarreau wrote: > That's a valid point, but in fact, building with NFS client and serial > port support in the kernel on some archs is as common as building with > IDE driver and VGA console in the kernel on x86. With some architectures > used in light networked workstations, it's very common to boot from the > network (sparc & parisc come to mind, sorry to those I forgot), hence > this common practise.
I have no influence over the distributions' choice of kernel compiler options. The fact is, though, that few of them support nfsroot out of the box. AFAICS FC-6 is one of those that appears not to. > > As for the initramfs support, hpa has assured me that his klibc > > distribution already has a full solution for NFS mounting on current > > kernels. > > That's again where we see the limits of this ever-developping 2.6. > I'm not saying that doing this from initramfs+tools is a bad solution, > since it solves lots of problems, it's just that it is *much* different > from what was previously done. > > People who have installed a distro on their machines will not be > able to upgrade their kernel past a certain point by hand. Upgrading > distro packages in such environments is generally not always an > option (particularly boot packages such as boot loader and kernel), > because the boot server is not necessarily running on the same > OS/distro, and sometimes the kernel needs different build options. Most people that run nfsroot systems do so because that makes provisioning of new machines easy: if you only have one system image, then upgrading it is less of a challenge. > Then the remaining solution to get stability and security fixes > is often to [cross-]compile a more recent kernel, and to put it > on the boot server. Fortunately Adrian maintains 2.6.16 :-/ No comment. Trond - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/