Re: [Etherboot-developers] Re: [Etherboot-users] (no subject)

[Jason A. <jan...@mi...>]

Paul Reece wrote:

> On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, Marty Connor wrote:
>
>> On Mar 30, 2005, at 4:00 PM, Jason Andresen wrote:
>>
>>> Testing with the latest Etherboot development release:
>>> 1. Booting FreeBSD 4 ELF Kernel (4.9): Works
>>> 2. Booting FreeBSD 4 bootloader bootsectors (to load the OS off of 
>>> the drive): Works!
>>> 3. Booting FreeBSD 5 bootloader bootsectors:  Kernel dumps core when 
>>> trying to install keyboard driver.
>>> 4. Booting Windows Advanced Server 2003 bootloader bootsectors: Works
>>> 5. Booting Grub bootloader bootsectors: Works
>>> All of these are booting via the floppy drive.
>>
>>
>> This is great news!  I hope that we can debug #3 and figure out why 
>> the core dump happens.
>
>
> I'd be interested in exactly what is meant by 'bootloader bootsectors' 
> in the above?  As far as I am aware, the only way to boot FreeBSD over 
> a network is either:
>
>  - with a correctly built ELF kernel (with BOOTP and NFS support)
>  - via FreeBSD's pxeboot.

I grabbed boot0 via dd if=/dev/ad0 of=bootsector.img bs=512 count=1

I configured my DHCP server to hand out that bootsector to the etherboot 
machine. 

I did this so I can choose between network booting a machine and having 
it boot off of the local drive by just changing a couple of symlinks on 
the netboot server machine.

Each machine is booted with an etherboot floppy (I don't have the 
hardware to burn it into the ROMs),  the DHCP server is configured to 
tell each machine to go for a particular disk image on the TFTP server. 

Server 1 loads bootsector-1.img, Server 2 loads bootsector-2.img and so 
on. 

By linking a netbootable kernel to bootsector-1.img, I can netboot the 
machine (which I do to drop new images on the local HDD), and by linking 
to a bootsector I can have the machine boot using whatever OS is on the 
local HDD.  This works in most cases, but FreeBSD 5 kernels for some 
reason always core dump when trying to load the keyboard controller.