[Beowulf] Diskless booting help:

[Lombard, David N]

On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 02:50:19PM -0400, Mark Hahn wrote:
> >But, I assume network configuration is viewed as a userland activity,
> >and not something the kernel per-se should be involved in--your "simple
> >convenience" argument of earlier.
> 
> I'm actually persuaded by the concept of doing all IP config in user-space.

Agreed.  That's the reason I heed HPA's advice. ;)

> but since tftpd is user-space, ipappend seems like a great way for one 
> piece of user-space (tftpd) to communicate with another (initrd ip config)
> without involving another fairly complicated tool (dhclient).
> 
> in other words (and afaik), the kernel has never been tweaked 
> to recognize the ipappend string...

net/ipv4/ipconfig.c handles it.  Having said that, it would be trivial to
handle it strictly in userland in an initramfs.  In that vein, I have
a shell script that emulates pxelinux, so that I can provide a superset
of PXE booting in userland with only kexec and either a tftp client or
wget to replace tftp with http or ftp.  Clearly, supporting https, scp,
multicast, et al. are also possible.

-- 
David N. Lombard, Intel, Irvine, CA
I do not speak for Intel Corporation; all comments are strictly my own.