*BSD News Article 25703


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!torn!mcshub!martin
From: martin@innovus.com (Martin Renters)
Subject: Re: Diskless workstation support.
Message-ID: <1994Jan7.215758.9020@mcshub.dcss.mcmaster.ca>
Sender: usenet@mcshub.dcss.mcmaster.ca
Nntp-Posting-Host: foxtrot.innovus.com
Organization: Innovus Inc., Hamilton, Ont. CANADA
References: <CJ89nM.L41@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 1994 21:57:58 GMT
Lines: 24

In article <CJ89nM.L41@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>,
Jim Pitts <pitts@mimosa.astro.indiana.edu> wrote:
>I have a question that I would be intrested in seeing a discussion on.  Is
>it possible for FreeBSD or NetBSD to support a diskless workstation?  The
>advantages are obvious if this could be done.  Is this something that might
>be possible in the future?  Is it something that is planned?

It certainly is possible.  Back in the 386BSD 0.1 days I posted a set of
patches to make this work.  At the time they required having a floppy drive
on the system which would load the kernel into memory.  Once loaded the
root and swap filesystems were mounted via NFS off the network.

Work has progressed since then and I am currently working on a boot rom
that will perform a BOOTP/TFTP load of the kernel.  While there are
several other boot rom implementations, the goals for this one are:

	1) Fit in an 8K rom (ie: support for older WD8003 cards)
	2) Handle NFS rootfs and swapfs selection at boot time
	3) compilation using GCC/GAS
	4) compilation to a DOS .COM file for booting from DOS



Martin Renters			martin@innovus.com