colinux-devel

[coLinux-devel] Booting colinux with network block device

[Sergio P. <spa...@zi...>]

Hi all,

I'd like to start colinux from a NBD partition, is this possible?

Imagine you have a export for the device with all the files in a windows
nbd server. ¿in what way can colinux start with that disk? I understand
I have to Modify initrd and run nbd-client for get the exported device
in /dev/nbd0 but I don't know if I have to do something with the command
line of colinux for make colinux to see the disk. 

Any help is appreciated.

Regards,

-- 
Sergio Paracuellos
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Re: [coLinux-devel] Booting colinux with network block device

[Henry N. <hen...@ar...>]

On 11.02.2011 13:29, Sergio Paracuellos wrote:
> I'd like to start colinux from a NBD partition, is this possible?
>
> Imagine you have a export for the device with all the files in a windows
> nbd server. ¿in what way can colinux start with that disk? I understand
> I have to Modify initrd and run nbd-client for get the exported device
> in /dev/nbd0 but I don't know if I have to do something with the command
> line of colinux for make colinux to see the disk.

After the device nbd is working, there is the same than native Linux. I 
don't know how you can use nbd as root filesystem, and I also don't know 
how a Windows NBD server would work with special device nodes (files in 
/dev and special files like fifi/pipe).

You should first start from normal running coLinux and try to mount the 
nbd. After you can see the complete file structure with all binaries 
(/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin,...) and all special devices in /dev, than you 
can begin to run this from initrd.

You needs to give the same command line as in native Linux. This is the 
base:
   colinux-daemon kernel=vmlinux initrd=initrd.gz root=/dev/ram0

First you should mount a cofs to load the modules and other Linux files 
(nbd client?) from Windows host. In your initrd you needs to load the 
module for device "nbd" and do all the networking setups. All this you 
should do step by step from command line. After you know what you need, 
you can put all steps into a script and all missing files into the 
initrd. The script you can name /MyStart.sh in root directory of initrd. 
Than add "init=/MyStart.sh" to the colinux-daemon command line above.

-- 
Henry N.