Re: Netbooting a sparc64

[Eduardo Horvath <eeh%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

First, you need to tell us if you're netbooting to install a system on a 
disk or plan to use NFS root.  The answers may be different in each case.

On Fri, 28 May 2010, DL wrote:

> For whatever it may be worth by the way the sparc64 machine
> is a Sun Ultra 5 running OpenBoot 3.31.
> 
> When ofwboot.net begins to execute it generates a line with 
> each attempt to find a kernal which I currently see appearing
> like so:
> 
> root=0.0.0.0 path=
> 
> I suspect that I need DHCP server to respond to ofwboot.net's 
> BOOTP requests with the root path to the NFS share where 
> netbsd-INSTALL.gz is located... correct?

Yes, you need to provide the IP address and path to what the kernel will 
mount as the root directory.

> A couple of other questions while I'm at it:
> 
> Will ofwboot.net use netbsd-INSTALL.gz in its compressed format
> or do I need to decompress it before ofwboot.net retrieves it?

ISTR ofwboot will uncompress the kernel.

> The sparc64 installation guide at 
> ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-5.0.2/sparc64/INSTALL.html
> says to tar -xpzf the instfs.tgz file. Just to be clear... should
> I un-tar this archive into the NFS share directory?  Or can/will
> ofwboot.net retrieve the instfs.tgz file from the NFS share and
> un-tar it into a ramdisk on the sparc64 machine?

netbsd-INSTALL should have a built-in miniroot, so if you want to install 
the system that's all you need for the initial boot.  instfs.tgz is only 
needed if you use netbsd-GENERIC.

Also I think you can skip the whole NFS mess and load the kernel using 
TFTP if you use "/tftp:netbsd-INSTALL.gz" for the filename.

Eduardo