Re: [gentoo-dev] RE:Boot floppies

[Michael Andrews <ma53@drexel.edu>]

> What about a Grub floppy which allows netbooting like on SUN?
> The same image you would netboot could maybe also be used for
> PXE booting/installing.
> This would really rule because people with more than one machine
> could have a tftp server which provides the gentoo-netboot image
> which can be used with either a Grub floppy or a PXE capable
> networkcard.

i think alot of people would be able to use this to boot diskless clients.  in order to do this you would have to design the package flexible enough so that you could choose NOT to use a bootloader (eg. grub).  for instance i currently PXE boot various diskless machines for an openMosix cluster.  the network bootloader they use is pxelinux in the sys-apps/syslinux ebuild.  after pxelinux executes it tells the machine where it can mount its root over nfs.  this is where Gentoo floppy would come.  currently i have to manually set up a basic filesystem with things like /bin, /lib, /etc, etc..  it would be really awesome if i could just emerge a basic lowlevel filesystem which would be part of the Gentoo floppy package.
just some thoughts,
michael

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