Re: gnu-20011016.tar.gz available
> Well, I don't think you would need or use pfinet to boot from a networked
> storage, although I am also not clear on exactly what it would require. You
> would probably use a different bootstrapping filesystem than ext2fs, but
> even this can be loaded over the net with GRUB (which is what I meant
> above).
I was referring to network devices or nfs.
> In any way, a diskless Hurd system can now be implement without adding
> network support in serverboot.
>
> Oh, and of course partitions can be handled in user space without adding
> partition support to serverboot, too.
Well, what you are dealing with is a the chicken and egg type problem.
If a root device is a network store, the server will need to open a
network connection using socket () (or another similar function which
accesses pfinet). The implementation of socket () opens
/servers/socket/2 to get a file descriptor. However, as this would
happen before there is a root file system, the function will fail.
What is needed is either a way to specify how to access a particular
pfinet server through, e.g. an environment variable (which would be a
big win as this would permit us to use multiple pfinet servers
transparently) or implement something equivalent to pivot_root in
Linux. Either way a new mechanism will need to be added to pfinet to
allow authorized users to connected it to other nodes (e.g. via the
fsys_forward rpc) and possibly disconnect it from nodes (to permit a
form of pivot_root -- otherwise a reference to the old root file system
would persist).
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