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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!enews.sgi.com!news.sgi.com!howland.erols.net!worldnet.att.net!uunet!in2.uu.net!140.142.64.3!news.u.washington.edu!uw-beaver!news From: "Marc E. Fiuczynski" <mef@cs.washington.edu> Subject: Re: who uses the netboot loader??? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Reply-To: mef@cs.washington.edu Sender: news@beaver.cs.washington.edu (USENET News System) Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Organization: University of Washington Message-ID: <32B9D27E.329F@cs.washington.edu> References: <32B8AED4.5D97@cs.washington.edu> <59c3sp$iqc@raven.eva.net> X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0Gold (Win95; I) Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Nntp-Posting-Host: fastnet.cs.washington.edu Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 23:40:46 GMT Lines: 29 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:32819 J.C. Archambeau wrote: > > Marc E. Fiuczynski (mef@cs.washington.edu) wrote: > > : Just curious how many people actually use the netboot loader that comes > : with FreeBSD? I.e., the one that allows you to load the kernel via > : ethernet. Our group will use it alot because we are doing lots of > : kernel development. > > The problem with the netboot loader is that it only supports a narrow > spectrum of ethernet cards. Glad you brought that up. I'm in the process of hacking together a different type of netboot loader that just uses the native FreeBSD drivers. This should vastly improve which devices you can have on your diskless machine. BTW, I'm not using the netboot loader for diskless machines, but rather because we do a lots of kernel development and just want to boot our crash machines remotely. Currently I have the 3c905 working mostly, which is a 100Mb/s card. Mostly, for this to work requires mbuf support, memory allocation and deallocation, some components from isa.c and pcibus.c. I will release this work when I'm done. However, this probably wont happen for another month, because I'm leaving for an extended vacation this Sunday. :) Whoever is interested in collaborating on this can send me email. I'll gladly tell you in more detail what I've done so far. Marc