Re: NFSroot & Power4
Hi,
Troy Benjegerdes writes:
> Our environment at the lab is a netboot+nfsroot setup... Is there a
> reasonable way to make a debian kernel image nfsroot?
Well, the straightforward way would be to build the necessary drivers
into the kernel, but as you say correctly, this is a lot of overhead
for little actual benefit. It should be possible to use an initrd for
bringing up an nfsroot, after all it's nothing but pivot_root with
some dressing, but I don't know whether this is taken care of in the
current mkinitrd script.
> What is the state of initramfs? Is it at all useable?
You mean using cramfs for initrd? Debian has had this for quite some
time now, and it works very well for the PowerMacs.
> The additional problem is I believe the pSeries firmware we have
> will only netboot a zImage.. it can't use yaboot, etc, which means
> the zImage would have to have a ramdisk image packed up with it.
There is a script called mkvmlinuz that takes a kernel image as an
uncompressed elf file and a ramdisk as an uncompressed filesystem
image and creates a zImage.
> Also, would it make more sense to have '-g5, -g5-smp, -pSeries-smp,
> -iSeries-smp' kernels instead of power3 and power4 non-smp variants?
> Are there any single-cpu power3/power4 machines?
This kludge is history. There is -power4 and -power4-smp now, and
they run fine on the PowerMac G5.
> Personally, I'd be happy with completely depracating the -power3 and
> -power4 kernels until we have a 64 bit biarch compiler package.
Ideally, we will simply exchange the contents of the packages then.
Regards, Jens.
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