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From: Christoph P. <chr...@gm...> - 2002-03-01 18:53:35
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Hello ,
"Eric W. Biederman" wrote:
>
> Christoph Plattner <chr...@gm...> writes:
>
> > Ok, I will think about writing the HOWTO ...
>
> Currently etherboot asks the question
> Boot from the network or (L) local.
>
> And if you press L etherboot exits and the boot continues.
On that Phoenix-Bios we had problems. BBS loads the etherboot
(first device in the boot order), after the timeout (3sec)
it exits, but then it loads etherboot again, and again ....
What I do not know now, was, if etherboot was called only
3 times (as 3 NIC of the same type was installed), or
endless, as the BIOS always stars the boot order from the
first entry.
Using NO_DELAYED_INT has shown following:
1. Etherboot was started 3 times (perhaps for 3 NICs), independent,
of the NIC BootROMs wer activated or not (the etherboot
image was written to an extra ROM on the ISA bus on 0xD0000
2. After the third etherboot has exited, the mesaage "No System found,
press ENTER ..."
After pressing ENTER, the system boots locally.
So my further idea was: Let boot etherboot as "normal" ("legacy" is
here a missleading word ....) without following the BBS (no BBS
header structure including PCI and Pnp$ structure), but etherboot
itself is not changed (done by removing "-DPCI_PNP_HEADER").
After this, the image runs correctly. It was executed first, and
after exiting, the normal boot sequence continouses.
May be, this BIOS is buggy or some intergration steps were done in
the wrong way (the etherboot image will be embedded into the BIOS),
but I think it is a nice feature, to setup such a etherboot image.
>
> Are you asking for a way to say boot locally with an
> ethernet packet. Something like filename="/dev/hda";
> But with the BIOS doing the actual loading?
>
No, this is not suitable for our setup. The goal is to have
embedded machines in high safety critical applications, and
this machines must boot locally. But in the lab, the machines
should also be able to boot from net, without touching the BIOS
settings (the BIOS does not support serial console, and we do
not support screen and keyboard !).
> So if you have a BBS compliant bios you set etherboot up
> first in the boot order and this works (assuming you
> don't loose your cmos options.)
>
> A dhcp option to tell etherboot to give up sounds sane.
>
> Potentially an option to disable just BBS support but not PCI PnP support
> may also be sane. Though I would have to research that a little
> more to see.
>
> Eric
With friendly regards
Christoph P.
--
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