In the past I have successfully netbooted my A7000+, using just a local
kernel.  All you need to do is build a kernel with the relevant options to
get it's IP address and root filesystem over the network, and away you go.
Since this all happens after the kernel has taken control of the machine,
it's not really a bootloader issue.

It's not (AFAIK) possible to start a RISC OS machine from cold straight
into NetBSD, across the network.  You will probably always need a kernel
and a bootloader on the machine (even if it's on a floppy).  However, you
don't need any NetBSD partitions on a local disk.

Cheers,

David.

PS - There should be some docs on www.netbsd.org about setting up a
netbooting kernel...

On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, Kjetil B. Thomassen wrote:

> I have an Acorn Risc PC with no working IDE drive, and the rest of the
> drives are Power-tec ones. They are known not to work well with NetBSD
> *and* RISC OS, so if I am to make that work I have to dedicate them to
> NetBSD.
>
> I have a Sun SPARCstation 2 running NetBSD 1.4 with lots of disk, and I
> would like to use that as a boot server for my Risc PC, including
> mounting the kernel and the root file system.
>
> >From what I have seen, that probably is not possible today, but I may be
> wrong here. Am I wrong?
>
> Anyway it would be nice if we could be able to do this at some stage in
> the future, so is this something that is being worked on?
> What about the new bootloader? Will that take this option into account?
>
> TIA!
>
> Kjetil B.
> mailto:kjetil@thomassen.priv.no
> http://www.thomassen.priv.no/
>
>
>
>