Re: Can we boot from CD-ROM ISO for QEMU MIPS systems?

After some internet searching, it seems pretty clear that QEMU/mips cannot boot from debian CD. I hope anyone can prove that I'm wrong here.

Lacking of booting from CD-ROM, the next fancy idea I can think of is to set up the host so that it fakes to the network installer, providing files requested by installer with URL and supplying them from CD-ROM instead. To make this work, there should be some strick 1:1 mapping between the files on the internet and the files in the CD, which is beyond my knowledge.

Anyone can confirm or disconfirm whether this route might be feasible?

Jun

On Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 1:49 PM Jun Sun <jsun@junsun.net> wrote:

Thanks for the pointer, John. I tried that before (btw. see my comments under "monkey-jsun" name at the end. ;0)

The CD-ROM part does not work at all. The net installer still goes out to the network and fetch the latest release and install.

To prove my points, I ran with debian 10.2 net installer and mounted a debian 9.5 CD. In the end it is the buster that gets installed.

BTW, the main reason I asking for CD/DVD install is that, after a while old net installer are not available anymore. And even if you dig them out from archive CD's, they don't work anymore (probably due to some bits not available online). That prevents me from re-producing some old bits and potentially fixing some bugs there. If anybody knows how to work around this, I'd appreciate it.

Cheers.

Jun

On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 6:34 AM john doe <johndoe65534@mail.com> wrote:
On 11/16/2019 6:28 PM, Jun Sun wrote:
> Obviously this method works for x86_64 and i386, probably because they have
> bios.
>
> I tried the obvious combinations on MIPS with no luck so far
>
> - add "-boot d" option; and
> - also supply the kernel/initrd in the hope they might recognize "-boot
> d" and read from CD-ROM
>
> Just want to check to see if I'm heading to a dead wall or not.
>
> Cheers.
>

According to (1), that should be possible.

HTH.

1)
https://gist.github.com/extremecoders-re/3ddddce9416fc8b293198cd13891b68c

--
John Doe