Re: [Netconsole-devel] status?

[H. P. A. <hp...@tr...>]

Jim Garlick wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Anyone doing any work on this project?
> 
> A colleague pointed the sourceforge project out to me.  I have some code
> already developed that enables me to do linux consoles over the Quadrics
> Elan cluster interconnect, and I had planned to extend this to include
> ethernet if I could figure out how to do it in a non-hardware-specific way.
> 
> On the elan, I can run a getty, capture printk's, even shutdown to single
> user and come back up again.  What I can't currently do is store the
> identity of the node that currently is connected to the console across a
> reboot, or of course, to talk to the BIOS (unless the BIOS is LinuxBIOS!)
> 
> Ultimately I would like to have this work over ethernet on an API CS20 node,
> which has ethernet wake-on-lan for power management and can do LinuxBIOS.
> In theory I could then dispense with serial consoles in a large cluster of
> CS20's.
> 

Getting LinuxBIOS to support Netcon would be a big win.  That shouldn't
even be that hard.  To make an unmodified BIOS support netcon probably
would involve a hacked network card boot PROM that intercepts INT 10h;
since a lot of network cards have EEPROM these days it might actually be
doable (perhaps using NILO or somesuch.)

Anyway, Jim, to give you a primer: we're talking about using UDP,
although a raw Ethernet option might be doable (the biggest problem with
that is that the packet limit is much smaller.)  You do, of course, need
an Ethernet card specific driver either way.

I am planning to add support for Netcon in the PXELINUX boot loader,
since it has the PXE stack available.

	-hpa


P.S. I have complained about the archive for this list not working.  I
hope it can get fixed.

-- 
<hp...@tr...> at work, <hp...@zy...> in private!
"Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."
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