Re: Etherboot/BSD Netboot root_path tag handling

[Bob Edwards <Robert.Edwards@anu.edu.au>]

Klaus Espenlaub wrote:

> I didn't mean to be democratic - I just wanted some more opinions or even someone
> telling me I'm totally insane dropping a feature his life depends on :)
> 
> Anyway, I understand your point, especially because the code in question is
> some x86 assembly code...
> 
Thank you for understanding my posting in the manner I intended - apparently I
appear to have offended at least one other person on this list with my
flippant
remarks about needing help thinking this out - sorry to all who misunderstood
my remarks - I'll be a little more careful in future.

> A short summary of the current behaviour (ONLY kernel images prepared with
> "mknbi-linux -d rom" are affected at all by the change - if you passed "kernel"
> or some absolute path with the -d option NOTHING will change):
> - the dirname of the boot file is used as the root FS source directory
> - if there was no dirname (i.e. the boot file used a /tftpboot relative name),
>   the option 17 value is used
> 
OK, well I use "-d ram" to mknbi-linux (I use the initial ramdisk loaded with
the kernel from the TFTP server as my root file system). Do you anticipate
that
your proposed change might upset that?

Thanks for your work on this and thanks for your detailed response to my
"plea"
for more information.

Cheers,

Bob Edwards.

> My original suggestion was to swap them, but Ken suggested to drop the dirname
> code altogether.  However this will break the use of mknbi-linux for boot loaders
> that don't pass the BOOTP info down to the next stage loader.  Etherboot has no
> problem with that, but who knows which loader does.  The comments in first.S
> indicate that at least ancient versions of (BSD) netboot didn't pass anything
> and some similarly ancient versions passed just the boot file name.  I'd expect
> those installations to be either extinct or keep using the old versions of
> mknbi-linux, so this is probably not a showstopper and Ken's suggestion is now
> my favourite.
> 
> Cheers
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