On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 02:10:04AM -0800, John Smith wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Is there anything like TILO, the Trivial Image LOader:
> 
> "used for building a simple TFTP boot loader which embodies several
> kernel images for different Sun architectures and a ramdisk root image.
> The images are gzip-ped to minimize memory usage."
> http://silo.sourceforge.net/tilo.shtml
> 
> for NetBSD on SPARC?
> 
> I have SPARCs without floppy drives and think it would be great to be
> able to TFTP boot a backup/recovery tool like g4u
> (http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/) or any of the other single floppy backup
> tools.  It would be just like booting a recovery disk, but instead of
> getting the image from the floppy, it would get it via TFTP, and since
> this is built into the SPARC PROM you could do this with a box that has
> a dead HD.
> 
> I've been searching around and based on the NetBSD network install
> method that requires NFS it does not seem like there is something like
> this for NetBSD.

Just tftp-based, I don't think there is.
However, note that for NetBSD you don't need to download multiple file,
just the kernel: the same kernel can boot on all sparc machines (but not
ultrasparc), and the kernel can contain the ramdisk (the INSTALL kernels
*do* contain the ramdisk). The NetBSD bootloader can be loaded from tftp,
and it can then load a kernel from NFS. Maybe if wouldn't be hard to change it
to load the kernel from tftp ...

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 24 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--