Re: Diskless Notebook

[Heinrich Rebehn <rebehn@comm.uni-bremen.de>]

Klaus Espenlaub wrote:
> 
> 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

Kernel 2.4.0 does have PCMCIA suppourt built in, so no user level
programs are neccesary. I also compiled in a driver for the card and it
_is_ recognized at boot time (at least the MAC address is shown and the
"link" light comes up. The real problem seems to be that the kernel
tries to autoconfigure IP _before_ the card is recognised. I will try
Ken Yaps's proposal (add ip=dhcp to kernel cmd line) next week.

Booting the kernel from network does work with netboot, however it is
quite slow.

BTW, i had all this working some 2 years ago with an older Linux kernel
(some 2.0.xx), but i can't get it to work with a current kernel.

I also tried a RAM disk with 2.2.17, but same problem: kernel tries IP
autoconfig _before_ mounting RAM disk and starting /linuxrc

Heinrich
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