> > What was holding us back so far, of course, was the fact that bootp
> > has no way to specify a swap file (which bootparams does). However,
> > I gather that with Matt's new swap code the kernel itself doesn't
> > need to get the swap path any more, so this move may now be practical.
> 
> Yes, it will be nice to have swap become optional.  However...
> 
> There was another thing holding back a BOOTP version of nfs_boot.c:
> The network stack used to make it difficult to send and receive UDP
> packets when you do not yet have an interface address.  I'm not sure
> if this is still a problem.  (have not looked lately)

I don't think either of these has been the real obstacle to
integrating BOOTP support; after all, kern/2351 which implements
full BOOTP support actually works (and therefore somehow
addresses both of these issues), and has been sitting there since
april '96.  I know that work based on this PR has just been
integrated in FreeBSD.

It's probably just that it's a set of large #ifdef'd changes to
the kernel that would need maintenance, and rarp/bootparams has
been the "official way" to do diskless booting.

  -  Arne H. J.