AFAIK, the RPLD mentionned on http://gimel.esc.cam.ac.uk/james/rpld/index.html supports the network boot of Sun SPARC boxen builtin BOOTPROM, which would be nice to have on Gentoo. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
As this seems to have little if at anything at all to do with sparc, bouncing back to bug-wranglers for a more suitable assignee
It's fun to see this hop from assignee to assignee, it seems nobody understands it's actual simplicity with respect to what it is. It is like DHCP or BOOTP a simple service running in (presumably) any kind of Linux, that has the ability to serve a boot protocol called RPL which in turn is requested by e.g. Suns BootPROM network bootloader. It would be an ebuild. Nothing Sparc specific, nothing kernel specific, nothing special at all. If nobody sees need/use for it... well, scrap it. But it doesn't make sense to see a mail specifying a different assignee every other week.
I'm not sure about this. According to the site, there is only one server that it has been tested on. The testing didn't seem to be that in depth. Plus it requires a special card that I doubt the majority of our users have.
Special Card ? I think the card mentionned just served as a source for reverse engineering. No requirement for the user. Anyways... i read there is a tftp image for sparc... so i assume there must be something there which servers boot information. Wil have to find out what it is.
Seems you were right. I just read the page wrong. They used the davicom card to reverse engineer it. I still don't like the little testing it seems to have, but I may be wrong. It is interesting none the less. One more things that kind of makes me worry is "rpld doesn't support the new bzImage format correctly." taken from the man page.
Do we use bzImage for sparc ? For mine it seems i'm anyways stuck with vmlinux.
Wait, I'm getting more confused. Does this only work on Sparc? I don't know anything about Sparc, let alone be able to make a judgement on it.
Yes. Sparc is the point in it, though it is not that it only runs on Sparc. It serves Sparc and that tlatter is the point of it. We know and have BOOT protocol support in gentoo already, but i was not ever able to get it to work so that i can boot my Sparc off my bootp server. Searching i found this tool and a plausible explanation on why it didn't work. That's because the protocol is different. Booting a Sparc off the net via it's "OpenBoot" PROM takes the protocol supported by this server (and as far is get their description, this protocol is also used by some PPCs). So this server (no matter if it runs on an i386 on whatever) should make it possible to boot a Sparc boxen diskless.
I've tried building this, it needs a lot of work to even compile. If you're having problems with netboot, check bug 37231 for help. For now, rpld seems too much of a hassle to get to compile, so I'd prefer to leave it out.
