Re: Advice on NFS support in grub

[OKUJI Yoshinori]

From: Olivier Galibert <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: Advice on NFS support in grub
Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2000 19:36:19 -0400

> Of course, I want to do it the grub way.  That means automatic
> completion where it makes sense.  With nfs, this means on the
> mountpoint and on the file/directory name.

  Hmm, I think the completion of file names would be easy, but how do
you support completion of mountpoints?

DISCLAIMER: I'm not familiar with NFS.

> It is easy (and small
> enough), the worst part is that it will require support of udp
> fragmentation on receive.  Please note that this is useless for
> etherboot since they have no real interactive interface.

  I can't understand this reason. If my understanding is correct,
fragmentation is required, because NFS usually uses 8192 bytes-length
packets and some network interfaces don't support so large packets
physically. Why is it concerned if the interface is interactive or
not?

> The syntax should be around the lines of
>   root (nfs,10.0.0.1,/tftpboot/jeru)
>   kernel /boot/vmlinuz [...]
> 
> or
>   root (tftp,10.0.0.1,/tftpboot)
>   kernel /kernel-jeru [...]

  Personally, I don't want to change the device syntax itself. So I
suggest this instead:

netdevice nfs 10.0.0.1 /tftpboot/jeru
root (nd)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz

> - Split our current netboot code between drivers (easily updated,
>   because unchanged) and protocols.  Only keep the drivers part in
>   sync with etherboot, and adapt the protocol part to our uses.

  This sounds good. We have already modified the protocol code,
anyway. As long as we can use the original drivers with no or few
modifications and your code is compact enough, you may do whatever you
like.

Okuji