Ian Burrell wrote:

> Andrew Basterfield wrote:
> 
>>
>> For a step by step guide to netbooting sparc please look here:
>>
>> http://www.lostgeneration.freeserve.co.uk/sparc/netboot.html
>>
>> this is sun4c biased but this is exactly the same for sun4m
>>
> 
> I tried netbooting and had problems with it as described in my other 
> message. I got netbooting to work with Debian and OpenBSD but NetBSD is 
> having trouble with my Sparc 10 accessing the root filesystem over NFS. 
> Is it possible to append the root ramdisk to the kernel image? Because 
> that seems to be what works with the other two OSes.


Heh, same reason I joined this list originally... and the same answer I 
got. I ended up running OpenBSD on all my netboots because NetBSDs 
netboot is broke when hosted off of anything but a netbsd server (and 
even then it didn't seem completely stable...) of course all my netboots 
are now retired, so it's kinda a moot point for me. Boxes with which 
NetBSD booting was tried: SS IPC, Sun 4/110 VME. Host servers: various 
intel boxes with mostly linux flavors on them, at one point I had a 
gimped 386 running NetBSD that finally managed to host boots occasionally.


> I am wondering why booting with the miniroot filesystem from a Debian 
> swap partition isn't working. Is there some incompatibility between how 
> Linux and BSD write the disklabel?

Yes. Linux doesn't use a disklabel, it settles for the partition table 
method, and emulates such on sun iirc. It's been forever since I 
spelunked through the linux code.