Re: [Etherboot-developers] [RFC] Relocation techniques...

[Peter L. <P.L...@sy...>]

> It's the age old problem of how to communicate load locations to the
> loader. Etherboot does it by prepending a directory in front, but this
> annoys people who want to boot kernel images fresh from the build.
> Personally I don't see an extra tagging step is a big hassle. Maybe one
> day all kernel images will be netloader friendly out of the build.

Some people seem offended by the idea of tagging. A few months ago,
someone on the syslinux / pxelinux list referred to LTSP's nbi images as
"polluted". This seems odd to me, but maybe if you are used to the
syslinux view of the world it makes sense.

> Another way might be a smart TFTP daemon that can assemble virtual
> tagged images on the fly.

It would nice to be able to break out into perl (i.e. a tftp cgi) since
mknbi is perl anyway.

> Yet another way might be a special tagged flag
> that says: this is just the header, keep the header around then append
> or subtract something from the filename to get the body of the image to
> fetch. I.e. the TFTP directory would contain:
> 
> 	vmlinuz.nb.dir	512 bytes, just the header
> 	vmlinux.nb	the real image
> 
> But then you'd need a utility to generate the headers, you can't just
> dump the image in the directory hot from the build, so why not just tag
> the thing in the first place?

Search me. It just seems to offend some people.