30 Jul
2016
30 Jul
'16
9:59 a.m.
On Sat, 30 Jul 2016, Greg Stark wrote:
The hardest part was getting mopd on Linux to serve up
the NetBSD boot
loader properly. The mopd for Linux didn't support ELF images and the
NetBSD boot loader isn't in mopd format in more recent versions of
NetBSD like it was in older versions. Now it's just ELF. But it's
finally working. If you use NetBSD to serve mopd this isn't an issue.
If you want to use Linux I can send you an mopd format copy of the
boot loader.
FWIW, I had to deal with a buggy DECstation REX firmware revision which
crashes on an attempt to use TFTP for booting (plus FDDI network hardware
such as DEFZA, etc. only supports MOP booting by design), so I have added
ELF support to Linux `mopd' some 15 years ago, to be able to netboot Linux
kernels with no hassle. I guess it's the matter of finding the right
patches then, and I'm sorry to hear you had issues despite that you
shouldn't have.
As I have figured out earlier this year only said ELF support patch as
well as some other improvements were imported by Debian soon after I made
them, and then the package maintainer broke them later on with another
patch applied on top. Obviously nobody noticed or cared to report the
breakage and I wasn't aware myself as I have only ever used my own RPM
packages which I have created in the first place and then built from
sources on a RedHat system.
Maciej