Re: [Etherboot-developers] Re: Etherboot and FreeBSD

[Doug A. <amb...@wh...>]

Michael Sinz writes:
| Ken Yap wrote:
| > |FreeBSD has a rather nasty design flaw that made me dig into
| > |Etherboot.  I tried to disturb as little as possible in the
| > |patch I submitted (here on this site)
|
| > Could you please resubmit to eth...@li....
| > Reason is the main FreeBSD maintainer is on that list. I don't have
| > FreeBSD myself and can't verify your patch. He can tell you if your
| > concerns are valid and if you have fixed it the right way.

I've been lurking and listening to his comments on the FreeBSD lists.  What 
he is doing is valid.  It is my understanding that he is loading the symbol
tables used for debugging and some other useful things.  I haven't
run into the problem since for debuging I do remote gdb and I have a
kernel in the NFS root so it can find things for top and such.
 
| Anyway, the patch is attached here (and this is going to the
| etherboot-developers list.
| 
| The problem (or not so much problem but design quirk) with FreeBSD
| is that it needs the debugging symbols (if you strip the kernel it
| will not work) to be loaded when the kernel is loaded.  Plus, these

This is a little strong and mis-leading since several people are apparantly
using something that doesn't work.  Not to mention some products in the 
thousands have been using this code for manufacturing so something works.

| symbols must be set up in a special way and pointed to via a metadata
| structure that is pointed to by the bootinfo structure that is passed
| as part of the boot process.
| 
| I have made changes to the osloader.c code to support this behavior.
| This lets FreeBSD be loaded via Etherboot for a diskless system
| (such as via DHCPD/BOOTP setups) and work.  This affects only the Elf
| (FreeBSD 3.x/4.x) versions due to the way symbols are handled.

I haven't tried the patches since I've been busy with some other stuff
but I think the concept is good and the feature is good so I don't see
any problem with this at a high level.  I'm actually happy to see this
work being done however wonder why he didn't send email to me directly
since I'm listed as the maintainer in FreeBSD ports collection.  Maybe
I missed something.

Doug A.