Thanks very much for your great replies :). Very glad that we are making progress and best wishes to our community and all of you too.
found a web log from Sameer Seth ( http://blogs.sun.com/roller/resources/sameers/boot_net.pdf) that gives in great detail the inetboot process for Solaris on SPARC (it is a pity that I found this so late). It brought me to think about the main difference between x86 multiboot and inetboot in the kernel side (just my thoughts, shoot me if wrong ). In inetboot (also ufsboot and hsfsboot), when control is transferred to the kernel, the NFS and network stack(tcp/ip, rarp, bootparamd) modules have not yet been loaded. The kernel needs to callback the services (called boot service in code base) of the inetboot bootstrap to read in those required modules from root fs and link them, pretty complex. In multiboot, the boot_archive that includes those modules is mounted as root fs via ramdisk. It is much simplier for the kernel to load and link them. The trick is the run time linking that reads in modules one by one. so what is the benefit of it in kernel startup and why not just link those required modules in build time (like Xen), which may posibbly save some booting seconds? Noah On 3/14/06, Leon Koll <napobo3 at gmail.com> wrote: > > http://napobo3.blogspot.com/2006/03/solarisppc-on-my-desktop.html > > Best wishes to the PowerPC community! > -- Leon > > On 3/13/06, Noah Yan <noah.yan at gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi, All, > > > > It has been so quiet (which is wired) in recent several weeks here. > Hopefully my update may stir something up. > > > > The inetboot, which allow a diskless system to boot over NFS root is now > functional. It can mount the root fs from the NFS server, load an elf > file(kernel), exitto it and let it go. I upload some camer shot (seems the > PowerMac G4 does not have serial port) in > http://polaris.blastwave.org/attachment/wiki/YanyhDiary/1.GIF, > > http://polaris.blastwave.org/attachment/wiki/YanyhDiary/2.GIF > > > > In brief, the inetboot bootstrap process is as follow: > > 1. openfirmware load the inetboot from tftp server and give control to > inetboot > > 2. inetboot initialize memory list > > 3. sends rarp request to get the host ip > > 4. sends whoami and getfile bootparamd rpc requests to get info for nfs > server and remote root > > 5. nfs-mount root fs > > 6. read unix over nfs and transfer control to it > > > > There is no joke at all for even this small task and there are so many > details that requires lots of doc/code reading and debuging (I even begin to > lean Forth now :o). My informal diary records those major changes which > could help if anybody is interested in this. > > > > This time, I do need to stop, synchronize and clean my code with the > main trunk. So give me some time to check in my code :) > > > > Noah > > This message posted from opensolaris.org > > _______________________________________________ > > powerpc-discuss mailing list > > powerpc-discuss at opensolaris.org > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/powerpc-discuss/attachments/20060314/4b1a82ed/attachment.html>
