RE: m68k boot floppies support ACSI ? VME?
> > > Are VME machines going to be supported?
> >
> > I believe so; Nick Holgate is working on the relevant stuff. I think
> > kernels and the like are already there, it's just a matter of getting
> > the bootable CD stuff in (which is my job).
>
> Kernels etc. are there; a problem with VME might be installation
> on diskless machines, I'm not sure we can mount a NFS root filesystem to
> install on with the current ramdisks. You should know if that's an option
on
> ix86 or some other arch.
Installing an NFS root file system works for VMR, the code just needs to be
enabled by a #define in dinstall.h, you just need to configure the network
as the first step of the installation, then you will be prompted with 'NFS'
when you select the 'mount previously initialised partition' option in
dbootstrap. I believe that if you don't have any local disks you will be
prompted to configure the network as the initial 'next step', though I
haven't had a chance to try that yet.
As for getting the initial kernel and ramdisk into memory, I have a package
'tftplilo' which provides this functionality for VME. Basically you
configure the VME boards to TFTP and execute the tftplilo binary. Tftplilo
then takes over transferring an ASCII configuration file which details
various boot configurations, i.e. kernel, ramdisk, kernel command line etc.
etc. The user is prompted to choose the configuration required, then
tftplilo proceeds to tftp and boot the selected kernel and ramdisk images.
The problem is that it's a new package and I'm not sure if I'm permitted to
upload this to 'frozen'. I would consider it quite important if we want to
fully support VME on this release, but that's just my biased opinion.
Nick
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