[cobalt-users] diskless booting kernels on Cobalt Raq4

["Albert Chaffman" <achaffma@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all..

I have been looking for someone to demonstrate what I am trying to do:

I have a Raq4 that I have already upgraded to Linux 2.4.19C1_III
including upgrading the firmware of the Raq4.  Everything works great
the way it stands, booting from disk, the 2.4 kernel from
ftp-eng.cobalt.com works fine, and all of the cobalt specific stuff
works great too.  Now what I want to do, is eliminate the harddisk
entirely.  I want to accomplish netbooting so the kernel is loaded over
the network.  I can console in, hit space to break, and type "bfn".
This loads the kernel from the flash (linux 2.2 kernel).  I put the
right options in dhcp to tell it to nfs mount to my other linux box.  It
seems to default to /nfsroot-x86 (just as it would during an OS
restore.. it must be hard coded in the flash kernel).  So I copied my
entire filesystem to my other linux box into /nfsroot-x86.  Put in the
/etc/exports the proper statements.  "bfn" loads the kernel from the
flash and successfully finds the root on /nfsroot-x86.  It has a number
of errors since my root is 2.4 based.

This is not good enough.. I want to be able to load the 2.4 kernel like
I do from disk..  from across the network. Is this possible?  Do I need
to setup a TFTP server like you do for PXE booting?


If there is no solution I will settle for one other solution though..
putting the kernel on a CF card (connected to IDE0) and tell it to get
root from nfs.  Other then that, all I can do is setup a linux 2.2 root
filesystem for the bfn option to like.  But then I have to re-do a lot
of stuff :)
   
Thanks for your help,
Albert Chaffman