On Tue, 20 May 1997, Matthias Drochner wrote:

> a) Use BOOTP/TFTP instead of RARP/BOOTPARAM/NFS. This is
>   a bit smaller. It requires more efforts at the server, since the kernel
>   additionally needs rarp and bootparam. I hope this will change.

This seems a reasonable move to me, since we now have machines (the
new OpenFirmware ones, I gather) that do bootp in the boot proms,
and can't do RARP in the second stage boot without downloading a
full set of drivers and autoprobe routines.

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.

One thing we would probably want to do, if we went ahead and did
this, would be to have a parameter for rarpd that would make it
read /etc/bootptab instead of /etc/ethers (or make it fake a bootp
request) so that we'd need only one configuration database for all
diskless machines, even if they need to do the initial bootstrap
with rarp instead of bootp.

I've redirected replies to current-users, since this is not
i386-specific any more.

cjs

Curt Sampson    cjs@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
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