>hi there > >forgive me if you consider this question stupid, but what about >improving the netboot toolkit for it can create images out of any >kind of program? > >is there anybody working on such a thing? You could be the first. :-) >it would be nice to have a mknbi (and no mknbi-XXXXX) that can take any >kind of kernel (eg. a freebsd kernel) and make it net-bootable. > >looking at the sources i roughly guess that the different OS's rely >on certain static facts which are unique to the specific OS. i'm >interested in information about those basic assumptions and structures >and would appreciate if someone might point me into the right >direction. Yes, that's more or less correct. Essentially Etherboot/Netboot are memory loaders. At the end of loading it jumps to a specified address. What you have to do is arrange the segments in memory the way you want by creating the tagged image file the right way, and then jump to any startup segment. How generic you can make it depends on your ingenuity. I think the first thing to read would be the Netboot Image specification. There's a HTMLised version from the Etherboot homepage.
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