Re: [BProc] Qn: Slave reboot due to monte protected mode

[Michal J. <mi...@ha...>]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 06:58:07PM -0700, Vipul Deokar wrote:
>
> When beobooting off a floppy, my slave node gets into
> a reboot loop. It manages to boot off the SYSLINUX
> image, successfully RARPs IP addr off the master, and
> downloads the phase 2 image but then fails with the
> following error message. 
> 
> monte: entry point (protected mode): 0x100000
> ...rebooting in 2 seconds...

If you can boot from an "external" media, be that a floppy, CD, a
local disk on a node or a network (say via PXE) then you can as well
boot a phase 2 kernels directly.  Just make with 'beoboot' script
separate kernel and its initrd and use that.

I found on various occasions kmonte hack iffy and/or not working at
all.  In particular at least in its current state it does not seem
to have much chance on 2.6 kernels. There kexec mechanism could be
used instead but this is still a work-in-progress.  OTOH on nowadays
x86 boards a PXE client in BIOS is something to be rather expected.

The main attraction of this two-phase boot is that if you change
your kernel then you do not have to send it to nodes, instead of
loading it as a phase 2 kernel, where such things like local disks
may not even exist (but on Alphas which had to boot via ARC/milo
this was the only way I found to get nodes going).  If you can boot
over a network anyway then what is the difference?  Load what
you really want to run from your boot server and be done with it.

A tip - when PXE-booting that way I am setting up DHCP and tftp
on one network and configure clustermatic to use the same
hardware interface but on an alias on another network so these
two are independent.  DHCP will not run on an alias, so there
is not much choice here, but clustermatic will.

   Michal