boot hangs after mounting nfs root but only with eprom not with floppy

[Rainer Schoenen <schoenen@schoenen-service.de>]

This is a request for help.

My diskless client doesn't continue booting after mounting the root filesystem via NFS.
This is ONLY if I boot with the boot EPROM, not if I use a floppy generated with the same settings.

I have used the minimal kernel (same for Eprom and floppy) for a 16K 27128 Eprom on a cheap NE2000 card.
I compiled a Kernel 2.2.16 with no modules and bootp/dhcp/nfs support, as well as the
Networking options / IP: kernel level autoconfiguration on

My root filesystem is a SuSE 7.0 minimal system (installed into directory /tftpboot/thin1).
Unfortunately the minimum possible system takes 140MB
(does anybody know how to create a much lighter system ?)

My server uses DHCP for providing bootp support.
I had to add /etc/ethers for the thing to work also.

Using the netboot image on a boot floppy works OK.
The root filessystem is mounted and the boot progresses
correctl until I can login.

The problem now is that using a boot ROM
(which looks correct using Romcheck)
correctly boots the kernel,
correcty mounts the nfs filesystem
but the the system stops with the last lines:
"UFS: mounted root (NFS filesystem)"
"Freeing unused kernel memory: 48K freed"

tcpdump on eth0 shows that NFS is used to load a big file.
This shows that only the "init" program is loaded, nothing more:
/tftpboot/thin1> ## find . -amin -3
./sbin/init

I have read the hints about dynamically loaded inits.
I made "chroot /tftpboot/thin1" and "ldconfig".
It seems my init is a good one and statically linked:
/tftpboot/thin1> ## ldd ./sbin/init
        not a dynamic executable


Does anybody have a hint what this can be (only with Eprom, not with floppy) ?

Can it be that the kernel must be told to exclude a memory area where the ROM is located ?

Thanks,

Rainer

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