Re: Diskless Notebook

[Klaus Espenlaub <espenlaub@informatik.uni-ulm.de>]

Richard C Ferri wrote:
> 
> Heinrich,
>      In my network boot kernel (which I run on diskless workstations, but
> haven't tried laptops) I have 4 options I had to turn on myself in the
> kernel:
> 
> NFS root on (CONFIG_ROOT_NFS)
> ext2 filesystem (CONFIG_EXT2_FS)
> BOOTP and RARP support (???)
> Enable option to get IP address from the original bootp  ( I think this is
> CONFIG_IP_PNP_BOOTP)
> 
> Do you have all of these enabled? Now, my diskette has only the ethernet
> device driver on it, not the entire kernel.  I serve my kernel over the
> network directly.  My kernel is also monolithic, meaning it has no loadable
> modules (all kernel options are yes or no, none are set to module)  I got
> my info from one of the original etherboot web pages, long ago...

Well, it would work this way with a number of laptops with built-in ethernet
(i.e. those which have a "mini"-PCI card built in, e.g. some IBM notebooks with
their built-in Intel EtherExpress chip).  If you have a PCMCIA/PCCARD
ethernet adapter, you need assistance from user level programs in Linux, so
getting those cards detected at boot time is pretty much impossible.  I agree
with the others that using an initial RAM disk is the way to go.  However it is
hard to know a priori which distribution can be easily adapted to "diskless" mode
with PCMCIA cards.  I'd suspect that SuSE would work, because they use initrd even
for a booting off SCSI drives - and support PCMCIA pretty well.  But this is just
a stab in the dark.

Note, to have a really diskless setup you'd need to find a network boot loader
that can handle those cards.  I don't know if such a thing exists.  It might
be possible with the Netboot package if you can get a packet driver that doesn't
need any other TSR programs to run the PCMCIA controller.  Etherboot definitely
doesn't support PCMCIA network adapters.

Klaus
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