Hello again folks,

On the subject of netbooting NetBSD-i386 on my NetVista, I've got a little
further, but definitely still need some help...  If anyone has ever got
NetBSD-i386 to succesfully netboot I'd love to hear from you <grin>.


I've coaxed the NetVista's boot PROM to load something over tftp, and this
stage of things works fine.  For the sake of seeing what happens, I just gave
it a GENERIC 1.5.2 kernel to download.  (Also tried INSTALL.)  I didn't see any
mention of a secondary boot loader being necessary for i386 so assumed there
wasn't one, although I'm happy to be corrected...

Anyway, it downloads the kernel.  Then the screen clears to a "Linux is
loading..." screen, and sits there doing nothing.  (These boxes can be bought
preconfigured to netboot TurboLinux.)


I don't know what it's doing at this stage.  It's possible the kernel is in
fact booting but I can't see the output because this 'holding page' has been
put up by the PROM to prevent users seeing the scary boot process, or else it's
possible (more likely) it's just hung...

So I now have a few specific questions <grin>:

1. Anyone who knows NetVistas, what ought to happen at this point??

2. I couldn't find a precompiled DISKLESS kernel for i386.  Are the GENERIC or
INSTALL kernels smart enough to look over NFS for a root partition if they
don't find a local disk, or do I need to build a new kernel?  (Obvious catch 22
- I don't have another i386 to do a build from.  (40MHz Sparc cross compiling
not a good idea, so if I have to build one myself I'm going to have to try and
build an i386 cross-compile environment on Irix... gulp...))

3. Should I be loading a secondary boot loader (GRUB?) over tftp, or should
loading the kernel directly work?

Thanks,
Tim.

-- 
Tim Walls
tim@snowgoons.fsnet.co.uk

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