Following this forum post: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-6206902.html?sid=90a4f15ec40d47a3a4b0091c82454045#6206902 I was able to successfully netboot VirtualBox VM (which emulates e1000 NIC) but could not mount image.squashfs from NFS due to missing NIC driver (r8169 "Realtek 8169 gigabit ethernet") on a real machine. After unpacking install-amd64-minimal-20110421.iso and then isolinux/gentoo.igz gunzip -c ../gentoo.igz | cpio -idv one can see that lib/modules/2.6.37-gentoo-r4/kernel/drivers/net/ has only 2 drivers: e1000 and tg3 (and etc/modules/net lists only them too) Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Setup network harness with dhcpd, tfptpd, NFS and stuff it with kernel, initrd and image.squashfs 2. Try in VirtualBox with e1000 emulation (addon required) - should be OK 3. Pick a host without e1000 or tg3 NIC or change NIC type in VirtualBox to pcnet - boot stops shortly after: >>Mounting root... udhcpc: SIOCGIFINDEX: No such device Actual Results: Setup cannot proceed as machine is not on network Expected Results: More modules are loaded and NFS is usable My pxelinux.cfg/default has this entry: LABEL Gentoo-minimal-amd64-nfs MENU LABEL Install Gentoo amd64 KERNEL gentoo/gentoo APPEND initrd=gentoo/gentoo.igz loop=/image.squashfs root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc looptype=squashfs nfsroot=172.16.0.1:/export/netboot/ cdroot=1 real_root=/dev/nfs dosshd passwd=guessMe
as proof of concept added all net/ drivers from image.sqashfs to unpacked igz tree and added r8169 pcnet32 atl1c to etc/modules/net repacked gentoo.igz find . | cpio -o -H newc |gzip -9 -c - > ../gentoo.igz.new Redeployed it to tftp server. Now VirtualBox VM can boot with AMD PCnet emulation and NFS mount is OK.
> After unpacking install-amd64-minimal-20110421.iso and then Same story with recent install-amd64-minimal-20110609.iso. List iso contents (app-cdr/cdrtools) : isoinfo -i install-amd64-minimal-20110609.iso -l Command to extract .igz : isoinfo -i install-amd64-minimal-20110609.iso -x "/ISOLINUX/GENTOO.IGZ;1"> gentoo-20110609.igz
This is caused by genkernel only adding support for e1000 and tg3. I've talked to genkernel maintainers and have got an ok to add more drivers to the x86 / x86_64 arches. What drivers would anyone suggest?
(In reply to Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto from comment #3) > What drivers would anyone suggest? i'd suggest 'r8169', 'atl1c' as they are quite popular with desktop mobo makers. VM emulated NICs (pcnet32, virtio-net, vmxnet3) probably should be suggested too.
Thanks for the suggestion. I've added a few more that I believe are common on server harddware[1][2]. [1] - http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/genkernel.git;a=commit;h=52c112cf039f2d5f875d0916da4977a4aa33073a [2] - http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/genkernel.git;a=commit;h=35d7275d87ee8c6831c3e92e1885701e0466b0bd
This should be fixed by now.