On Mon 05 Feb, Reinoud Zandijk wrote:
> Hi Kjetil,
> 
> On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, Kjetil B. Thomassen wrote:
> > I have an Acorn Risc PC with no working IDE drive, and the rest of the
> > drives are Power-tec ones. They are known not to work well with NetBSD
> > *and* RISC OS, so if I am to make that work I have to dedicate them to
> > NetBSD.
> 
> Oh thats a pity... hmm... well maybe we can change this partition stuff
> code so it suits that one too ?

When (if) I get the time, I will investigate this problem thoroughly and
file all the PRs that are needed.

> > I have a Sun SPARCstation 2 running NetBSD 1.4 with lots of disk, and I
> > would like to use that as a boot server for my Risc PC, including
> > mounting the kernel and the root file system.
> > 
> > From what I have seen, that probably is not possible today, but I may
> > be wrong here. Am I wrong?
> 
> Well AFAIK its perfectly suitable to use DHCP and a root on NFS ... that
> should work... If you dont know how to specify the root on NFS you can
> check out the GENERIC kernel for the syntax for AFAIK it isn't in the
> RISCPC kernel.

OK, fine.

> > Anyway it would be nice if we could be able to do this at some stage
> > in the future, so is this something that is being worked on? What
> > about the new bootloader? Will that take this option into account?
> 
> Now that is a challenge :)) ... yeah... would love that myself too... but
> its perfectly possible to boot the machine from disk with a netbsd kernel
> on ADFS and then netboot.

So, I could make a kernel made for netbooting, stick it on my Power-tec
formatted drive alongside your new boot loader and netboot with that
kernel?

This is what David Forbes tells he has done with the old boot loader:
>
> In the past I have successfully netbooted my A7000+, using just a local
> kernel.  All you need to do is build a kernel with the relevant options to
> get it's IP address and root filesystem over the network, and away you go.
> Since this all happens after the kernel has taken control of the machine,
> it's not really a bootloader issue.

And, finally we have Nicholas Clark writing:
>
> On Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 06:45:10PM +0000, David Forbes wrote:
> > It's not (AFAIK) possible to start a RISC OS machine from cold straight
> > into NetBSD, across the network.  You will probably always need a kernel
> > and a bootloader on the machine (even if it's on a floppy).  However, you
> > don't need any NetBSD partitions on a local disk.
> 
> I would expect you could do it with the RISC OS machine configured to boot
> from the network, and !Boot being served from a fileserver
> (ie Econet or later fileserver).
> 
> But you'd need to port RISC OS file server protocols to your network system.

Actually, I don't, as Ben Harris already has. At least as far as booting
over the network goes.

At present I am booting my Acorn R140 over the network like that. It
doesn't get very far having only 4 MB RAM, but still it mounts root and
the lot.

So, anyone out there who are willing to make me a kernel?
You see, I don't have a NetBSD/arm32 system up and running at present
due to the problems with the Power-tec and the fact that I don't have
any ADFS drives.

I'm not sure I will be able to test anything like this before the end of
February, so there is no rush, but it would still be interesting to get
this ball rolling.

If I can get root mounted from my ss2 I would be able to participate in
the arm32 development alongside the arm26 one.

TIA!

Kjetil B.
mailto:kjetil@thomassen.priv.no
http://www.thomassen.priv.no/