Thread: Re: [Etherboot-developers] Etherboot 5.1.2rc7 released

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Eric, good to see your ELF format kernel build is a candidate for the
next stable series of Linux.

http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=258

>I also haven't tried the external menu.  I used the internal menu a lot
>and can't get the external menu to work or any older netboot images
>like nbgrub or netboot versions of tagged DOS images.

Old images will not work. You *have to* rebuild all your images with
mknbi 1.2-10 or later.

>I had similar trouble with the external menu.  Actually I wasn't sure how
>to even create an external menu that functioned the same as the internal
>menu.  I tried mknbi-1.2-10 but anything I did resulted in it not working.
>It might be usefull to show exactly how to create an external menu that
>is compatible to the old system.  Either that or I'm just to dumb to 
>figure it out.

Just keep your DHCP options as they are, but specify a menu image as the
file to load (this was previously ignored when using internal menus).
Then make the menu image using mkelf-menu as explained in the mknbi man
page.

ke...@us... (Ken Yap) writes:

> >I also haven't tried the external menu.  I used the internal menu a lot
> >and can't get the external menu to work or any older netboot images
> >like nbgrub or netboot versions of tagged DOS images.
> 
> Old images will not work. You *have to* rebuild all your images with
> mknbi 1.2-10 or later.

Oh, I missed you were trying to run old images.  For clarificaion the
problem with old images is that they make an assumption that etherboot
will be in the same  64K segment (usually 0x9000) as part of the image
is loaded into.  Which becomes trivially non-true as etherboot moves
around.  Even a few cases in 5.1.x break this assumption but it is
quite rare.

Eric

Ken Yap writes:
| >I also haven't tried the external menu.  I used the internal menu a lot
| >and can't get the external menu to work or any older netboot images
| >like nbgrub or netboot versions of tagged DOS images.
| 
| Old images will not work. You *have to* rebuild all your images with
| mknbi 1.2-10 or later.

That's a shame since I liked runing mknbi-dos on a directory and it
making an image.  Also for some reason the floppy image I use
doesn't work with the Etherboot version but worked with the Netboot
image.  Also I would use Etherboot to load nbgrub to netboot
OpenBSD/NetBSD/Linux (and for Linux I could just boot the Linux
kernel directly without doing a mknbi on it).

| >I had similar trouble with the external menu.  Actually I wasn't sure how
| >to even create an external menu that functioned the same as the internal
| >menu.  I tried mknbi-1.2-10 but anything I did resulted in it not working.
| >It might be usefull to show exactly how to create an external menu that
| >is compatible to the old system.  Either that or I'm just to dumb to 
| >figure it out.
| 
| Just keep your DHCP options as they are, but specify a menu image as the
| file to load (this was previously ignored when using internal menus).
| Then make the menu image using mkelf-menu as explained in the mknbi man
| page.

Okay I got something to work.  I was confused the option mkelf-menu.
I had to add vendorext_is_valid=1 under FreeBSD since we use that for
swap path.  Doesn't look like there is any serial support and therefore
no dual console.  I tried to load FreeBSD via the menu and it died.

Hmm, now rebuilding Etherboot with -DRELOCATE caused VMware2 to
blow up changing the RELOCADDR address so it does conflict gets
me "Unable to load file" after it load the menu.  I'll try it on
real hardware again tomorrow.

*** mknbi-1.2.orig/menu.c	Fri Jul  5 06:42:00 2002
--- mknbi-1.2/menu.c	Wed Oct 23 19:55:07 2002
***************
*** 65,71 ****
--- 65,81 ----

  static unsigned char	*vendortags;
  static unsigned char	*end_of_rfc1533;
+ #ifdef IMAGE_FREEBSD
+ 	/* yes this is a pain FreeBSD uses this for swap, however,
+ 	   there are cases when you don't want swap and then
+ 	   you want this set to get the extra features so lets
+ 	   just set if dealing with FreeBSD.  I haven't run into
+ 	   any troubles with this but I have without it
+ 	*/
+ static int vendorext_is_valid = 1;
+ #else
  static int vendorext_is_valid = 0;
+ #endif
  static unsigned char	*motd[RFC1533_VENDOR_NUMOFMOTD] = { 0 };
  static unsigned char	*imagelist[RFC1533_VENDOR_NUMOFIMG] = { 0 };

Doug Ambrisko <amb...@am...> writes:

> Ken Yap writes:
> | >I also haven't tried the external menu.  I used the internal menu a lot
> | >and can't get the external menu to work or any older netboot images
> | >like nbgrub or netboot versions of tagged DOS images.
> | 
> | Old images will not work. You *have to* rebuild all your images with
> | mknbi 1.2-10 or later.
> 
> That's a shame since I liked runing mknbi-dos on a directory and it
> making an image.  Also for some reason the floppy image I use
> doesn't work with the Etherboot version but worked with the Netboot
> image.  Also I would use Etherboot to load nbgrub to netboot
> OpenBSD/NetBSD/Linux (and for Linux I could just boot the Linux
> kernel directly without doing a mknbi on it).

This is not a case of etherboot 5.1 changing things and deliberately
breaking old images.  This is a case of the etherboot 5.1 changes
exposing bugs in older version of mknbi.

So old images will work if they do not make invalid assumptions,
about where things live.  One of the major enhancesments of 5.1 
is that it does not need to live below 1MB anymore.  

If you want to help map out the breakage, feel free.  Changes to
etherboot to fix things are definitely appreciated.

Eric

>> 	http://www.etherboot.org/etherboot-5.1.2rc7.tar.bz2
>
>Ken is rc7 in CVS it still says rc5?

Yeah, sorry, forgot to check in the Makefile. Feel free to fix.

>Anyway a noticeable bug was found in igmp support, basically
>I should have implemented igmpv2 but I buggily implemented igmpv1, and I am a
>bout
>to check in the code.

Oh goody, more shakedown.

ke...@us... (Ken Yap) writes:

> >> 	http://www.etherboot.org/etherboot-5.1.2rc7.tar.bz2
> >
> >Ken is rc7 in CVS it still says rc5?
> 
> Yeah, sorry, forgot to check in the Makefile. Feel free to fix.

Fixed.

> >Anyway a noticeable bug was found in igmp support, basically
> >I should have implemented igmpv2 but I buggily implemented igmpv1, and I am a
> >bout
> >to check in the code.
> 
> Oh goody, more shakedown.

yep, and I just had to implement some minimal ip option processing to make
it work. igmpv2 requires the router alert option to be set, and appearently
cisco switches won't notice you want multicast data if alert them to your packet.
option.

Eric

ebi...@ln... (Eric W. Biederman) writes:

> yep, and I just had to implement some minimal ip option processing to make
> it work. igmpv2 requires the router alert option to be set, and appearently
> cisco switches won't notice you want multicast data if alert them to your
> packet.

The also don't notice your packets if you forget to calculate the ip
header checksum over the ip header options.  With that final fix
commited the code actually works :)

Eric

>| Old images will not work. You *have to* rebuild all your images with
>| mknbi 1.2-10 or later.
>
>That's a shame since I liked runing mknbi-dos on a directory and it

I didn't want to support the directory building functionality of the
ancient Netboot mknbi-dos in my version because there perfectly good
ways of doing this separately, e.g. mtools, mount, which are more
flexible, e.g. work on floppy images of any size, unlike the Netboot
version.  The Unix philosophy is of tools working together, not one tool
trying to do it all.

>making an image.  Also for some reason the floppy image I use
>doesn't work with the Etherboot version but worked with the Netboot
>image.  Also I would use Etherboot to load nbgrub to netboot
>OpenBSD/NetBSD/Linux (and for Linux I could just boot the Linux
>kernel directly without doing a mknbi on it).

Probably all of these need to be rebuilt either because of 5.1 exposing
the bug in mknbi and/or other differences as Etherboot evolved.

>Okay I got something to work.  I was confused the option mkelf-menu.
>I had to add vendorext_is_valid=1 under FreeBSD since we use that for
>swap path.  Doesn't look like there is any serial support and therefore
>no dual console.  I tried to load FreeBSD via the menu and it died.

Ok I've put in serial support in the CVS version, could you please test
it?

Ken Yap writes:
| >making an image.  Also for some reason the floppy image I use
| >doesn't work with the Etherboot version but worked with the Netboot
| >image.  Also I would use Etherboot to load nbgrub to netboot
| >OpenBSD/NetBSD/Linux (and for Linux I could just boot the Linux
| >kernel directly without doing a mknbi on it).
| 
| Probably all of these need to be rebuilt either because of 5.1 exposing
| the bug in mknbi and/or other differences as Etherboot evolved.

I'll dig through that and see what the issue is.

| >Okay I got something to work.  I was confused the option mkelf-menu.
| >I had to add vendorext_is_valid=1 under FreeBSD since we use that for
| >swap path.  Doesn't look like there is any serial support and therefore
| >no dual console.  I tried to load FreeBSD via the menu and it died.
| 
| Ok I've put in serial support in the CVS version, could you please test
| it?

I need to pull the CVS stuff.  I should be able to play with that today
since I think the current issues at work have easied off so I have some
time to play with it.

Thanks,

Doug A.

ke...@us... (Ken Yap) writes:

> Eric, good to see your ELF format kernel build is a candidate for the
> next stable series of Linux.
> 
> http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=258

Coming close. The bit that article refers to is my work to use linux as
a bootloader.  I may be able to get the ELF support in as well, but
sys_kexec is a big feature, and we have a feature freeze coming up.

I think I can get most of the kernel work I need done as a
subarchitecture, without impacting the rest of the kernel.  And
support for subarchitectures has gone in.

By the time I had a break from LinuxBIOS development I didn't have
much time to verify which patches were ready.

Eric

Thread: Re: [Etherboot-developers] Etherboot 5.1.2rc7 released

etherboot-developers