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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!utnut!torn!mcshub!martin From: martin@innovus.com (Martin Renters) Subject: Diskless 386bsd (was: conditional symlinks) Message-ID: <1993Mar20.161412.15422@mcshub.dcss.mcmaster.ca> Sender: usenet@mcshub.dcss.mcmaster.ca Nntp-Posting-Host: foxtrot.innovus.com Organization: Innovus Inc., Hamilton, Ontario, Canada References: <1993Mar17.205308.5672@fcom.cc.utah.edu> <1oelo8$dsc@walt.ee.pdx.edu> Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1993 16:14:12 GMT Lines: 31 In article <1oelo8$dsc@walt.ee.pdx.edu> rgrimes@acacia (Rodney W. Grimes) writes: >terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes: >: >: Has anyone heard from Martin Renters about the hard drive less boot >: disk he was working on lately? > >I take it you mean a whole system running from floppy via NFS? If so >I have not heard of Martin Renters work, but I did some of my own, it's >not too hard, and variant symlinks would make it real easy. I'm still around, but have been really busy at work trying to wrap up a product release and then getting sidetracked with a VM problem to spend much time working on the NFS bits. I did spend a fair bit of time last night fixing the config program to allow the specification of diskless setups. I will try to have something reasonably user-friendly available by the end of the weekend and will be posting patches at the time. These patches will enable you to boot from a floppy and then have a root filesystem mounted from a remote NFS node, as well as swapping to that node. Later plans include a 'weboot' program that will be ROM-able or executed as a DOS .COM program (alright...no flames :-) ) I have found the WD8013 cards work quite well, while the NE2000 cards need smaller than 8192 read/write sizes, otherwise they go into an endless "what was that???" mode. The 'wt' driver is also less than happy on a 4Mb/20mhz/386 using the diskless NE2000 setup, possibly because of interrupt latency problems. Martin martin@innovus.com