Subject: Re: Miniroot boot problems
To: Ian Burrell <iburrell@znark.com>
From: Gerald Richter <darklord@neonshadow.net>
List: port-sparc
Date: 06/04/2002 14:34:14
Ian Burrell wrote:
> Andrew Basterfield wrote:
>
>>
>> For a step by step guide to netbooting sparc please look here:
>>
>> http://www.lostgeneration.freeserve.co.uk/sparc/netboot.html
>>
>> this is sun4c biased but this is exactly the same for sun4m
>>
>
> I tried netbooting and had problems with it as described in my other
> message. I got netbooting to work with Debian and OpenBSD but NetBSD is
> having trouble with my Sparc 10 accessing the root filesystem over NFS.
> Is it possible to append the root ramdisk to the kernel image? Because
> that seems to be what works with the other two OSes.
Heh, same reason I joined this list originally... and the same answer I
got. I ended up running OpenBSD on all my netboots because NetBSDs
netboot is broke when hosted off of anything but a netbsd server (and
even then it didn't seem completely stable...) of course all my netboots
are now retired, so it's kinda a moot point for me. Boxes with which
NetBSD booting was tried: SS IPC, Sun 4/110 VME. Host servers: various
intel boxes with mostly linux flavors on them, at one point I had a
gimped 386 running NetBSD that finally managed to host boots occasionally.
> I am wondering why booting with the miniroot filesystem from a Debian
> swap partition isn't working. Is there some incompatibility between how
> Linux and BSD write the disklabel?
Yes. Linux doesn't use a disklabel, it settles for the partition table
method, and emulates such on sun iirc. It's been forever since I
spelunked through the linux code.