Eduardo Viruena Silva wrote:
>
> O! wise FreeBSD gurus!
> I ask for your advice...
>
> I have a FreeBSD 3.3 system in a Pentium computer and an old 486
> computer that I want to make a diskless system.
>
> I found that in directory: /usr/src/sys/i386/boot/netboot
> there is a way of building "nb3c509.com" program.
> This program is used to emulate the "boot" chip for my 3c509 card.
> It seems to work fine.
Cool! It still works! :-)
> It can get the "freebsd.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" file containing the parameters to
> download the kernel image. It works ok and tries to download the
> image. Nevertheless it halts displaying a message saying:
>
> kernel: Bad executable format!
>
> (or something like that).
>
> FreeBSD 3.3 uses ELF format and previous versions (2.x.y) use AOUT format.
>
> According to my believes, it seems that there is a function (or macro)
> called "N_BADMAG" that tests the kernel file type, but I could not find it
> in the source files. Trying to overcome this problem, I forced the test,
> but "elf" image did not work.
I guess when the new fancy 3-stage disk boot and ELF format
support was introduced the network boot code was not updated and
this seems to be the root of the problem.
> Is there a way of building "nb3c509.com" accepting ELF format ?
> == ===== = === == ======== ============= ========= === ====== =
I guess yes but that would need some significant amount of work.
> Do I have to create an AOUT kernel image?
>
> will it work?
> it seems to works...
>
> Now, can you tell me which "/etc/rc.*" configuration scripts are executed
> in the booting process? what file systems do they try to mount?
The main script is /etc/rc which calls the other scripts.
Normally it tries to mount the filesystems listed
in /etc/fstab.
> what is a "mfs" ? (memory file system? a virtual disk?)
Yes, memory filesystem.
> My computer gets frozen because of some kind of problem while booting.
> it seems to be mounting several file systems in a "mfs" while it
> starts.
Does it happen during the diskless boot ?
A good way of finding out which command is running now is
pressing Control+T. And Control+C may be used to interrupt
the current command if it seems to hang by unknown reason.
I think that to use mfs a large enough amount of swap space
must be configured. Otherwise I don't know what would happen
when it gets out of memory but certainly nothing good. And
if the swap space is configured over NFS then swapping is
very slow.
> Documentation about diskless installation is *very* old.
I guess I was about the last one who touched it around '95.
I can't remember any use of mfs in the netboot. I ran it
with both root filesystem and swap on NFS and it ran
although very slowly. Also I remember that I had very
little memory (2MB to 4MB) on the diskless machines and the
boot worked VERY slowly even on the 4MB machines until I cut
the rc script to the very basics.
-SB
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