On Thursday 17 April 2008 11:11:40 am John Summerfield wrote:
> Jarod Wilson wrote:
> > [...]
> >
> >> A drawback is that the NIC's driver has to be in the kernel for ip=dhcp
> >> to work. I presume the same applies for this.
> >
> > Yes, as I understand it, the NIC driver has to be up and running for
> > netconsole to work (netconsole relies on a polling mode feature that has
> > to be implemented in each NIC driver), so to make this doable, we'd have
> > to turn on the in-kernel dhcp server and build all netconsole-capable NIC
> > drivers into the kernel. I'm guessing chances are slim that'll happen,
> > but I'm not guessing in any official capacity. :)
>
> I'd be fairly surprised to find ne2000, tulip and such, but (given the
> amount of RAM commonly available these days) it might not be so silly to
> build, for example, support for Gbit NICs, or for NICs commonly found
> built into recent mobos.

Except that I'm pretty sure most of the big NIC vendors really want their 
drivers built as modules -- easier to replace them with updated variants that 
way to support new hardware before the next dot release. If anything, I think 
there's more push to make more things modular than there is to make anything 
built-in, without significant justification.

> I've reread the documentation; it doesn't say that it does what I'd like
> it to do (I don't like manually specifying IP addresses).
>
> netconsole does work as a module, so if I get it all into an initrd it
> should work, provided the kernel's dhcp _client_ it available it could
> work as I'd like.
>
> It won't get everything, but it might log up the problem I have with the
> kernel not finding my disks.

Sounds plausible. I'd say file an RFE, if you haven't already. Now, if 
netconsole is a module, can the NIC driver be a module and still get an IP 
via the in-kernel dhcp client?

> Back to Ahmed, should it not be possible to construct a procedure that
> activates his network and allows remote login, even when his disk needs
> a good fsck?

Certainly. The initrd created for use by kdump does quite a bit of this sort 
of thing for you already, would likely only need minor extension to include 
sshd and start it up...


-- 
Jarod Wilson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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