Re: what about netbooting anything?

[markus@infoscape.com]

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Martin Dudle writes:

 > 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?

Booting an operating system is a very tricky thing, and therefore all
operating systems use fundamentally different approaches to doing
this. While it would theoretically be possible to join all of the
mknbi-* programs under one single wrapper, there will not be very much
code that they will have in common.

 > is there anybody working on such a thing?

Not as far as I would know, but if all you worry about is having a
single program, then it should not be very difficult to write a shell
script that calls the correct executable.

 > 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.

I do not have a freebsd system (as a matter of fact, I do have
anything other than NT right now anyways), but writing a version of
mknbi-freebsd should be very simple. You can probably modify
mknbi-linux and use "etherboot"'s loader for freebsd as a
reference. IIRC, freebsd directly loads an ELF image file.

 > 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.

If the operating system, that you want to load, comes with source
code, then the best bet is taking a look at the source and possibly
also taking a look at what other loaders (e.g. LILO, or the Grub)
do. If the operating systems do not include source code, then you will
have to dig up some other reference. This might not always be a simple
task. If the target operating system has not been written with
remote-bootability in mind, then things can be very tricky --- this is
the reason why we still cannot boot NT.

Good luck and feel free to ask specific questions,


Markus

--
Markus Gutschke                         Internet: markus@infoscape.com
Infoscape, Inc                          Phone:    +1-415-537-3778
657 Mission Street, Suite 200
San Francisco, CA 94105

Disclaimer: The above message represents my personal opinion; It does
            not constitute an offical statement by Infoscape!

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