Re: nfs root for boot floppy? or initrd loaded via tftpd?
On Tue, Jul 24, 2001 at 12:45:00PM -0700, Sam Powers wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Jul 2001, Craig Sanders wrote:
>
> > (all this because mkfs.xfs and other XFS utilities won't fit on
> > the boot floppy and i have a dozen machines to build using XFS. i
> > *could*
>
> If this is more about xfs than it is about the magicks you're
> trying to accomplish,
i'm trying to do both - build systems with xfs and make myself a faster
(i.e. single-floppy) install.
> I suggest trying the xfs boot floppies from http://www.digitaltux.com/
> which worked fairly well for me. Of course, it's not the most sure
> fire way of installing with xfs, but it's surely the easiest.
i tried these, but they didn't have aic7xxx SCSI support compiled in.
so, i compiled my own kernel with aic7xxx, xfs, loop, ip autoconfig
(dhcp) etc support and made a combined kernel + ramdisk image
(containing root.bin plus bash plus libc6 & ncurses etc plus xfsprogs
and more) which is loaded by tftpd using an etherboot floppy.
i also made a new rescue.bin and drivers.tgz which are on the ramdisk
image (so the kernel can be installed onto the new system by choosing
"mounted fs" and "/")
it took ages to figure out all the details, but it works like a charm
now. i have to run mkfs.xfs on the Alt-F2 console but that's no big
deal - i usually run fdisk and mke2fs from there anyway as i don't like
cfdisk.
there are GLIBC2 problems with the lilo on the boot-floppies vs the
libc6 i had to install for bash and xfsprogs, so i also have to run
"chroot /target" and then run "lilo" to get it to boot from the hard
disk.
one thing that struck me is that while the boot-floppies have a much
nicer user interface now, there's a lot of stuff which is hard-coded
that makes it difficult to do stuff like this. e.g. it won't run
off an nfsroot filesystem; the menu can't even mount a filesystem
formatted by xfs (fails with useless error message about file not found
- fortunately, running mount on the command line works ok).
this is with the potato boot-floppies, so it might be fixed in woody. or
maybe not.
running root.bin (plus extras like bash and mkfs.xfs) from an nfsroot
would have been much more convenient and easier to work with than an
initrd - that would have allowed changing the nfsroot partition without
rebuilding the initrd.gz and more importantly, without rebooting the
machine i was installing debian on.
craig
--
craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>
Fabricati Diem, PVNC.
-- motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch
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