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Re: mkbsdimage



> From: oit_student@yahoo.com
> Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 18:25:22 -0700
> To: oskit-users@fast.cs.utah.edu
> Subject: mkbsdimage
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> I was trying to install oskit on a freebsd 4.2 system. i have the most
> current version of oskit. however when i do a configure i notice that
> i get the following error:
> 
> configure: warning: Cannont build BSD boot adaptor (boot/bsd) as
> linker does not support a.out format

Ugh!  It occurs to me that this isn't going to work anyway.  Newer
FreeBSD boot loaders (probably since 4.x) won't load a.out binaries
anyway.  I just tried it on 4.1.1 to verify this.  We haven't used
mkbsdimage except on our old test machines with FreeBSD 2.2.5.  Most of
our testing anymore is done on our testbed (emulab.net) where we can
load OSKit kernels with a PXE boot loader.

Options:

1. Boot from a GRUB floppy.  This is a pain in the butt for you.
   Not so bad if you have a dedicated test machine where you can just
   leave the floppy in all the time.  The easiest thing to do in this
   situation is to put "netboot" on the floppy.  Netboot is our little
   OSKit meta-kernel that can be used to load other OSKit kernels over
   the network.  Note that if you want to use netboot, you have to have
   a BOOTP/DHCP server running and you have to have NFS server support
   on the machine you are loading kernels from (i.e., netboot uses NFS
   to load kernels).  If you want to go the netboot root, you can
   create and download your own custom netboot floppy image at:

	http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/boot-floppy.html

2. We fix mkbsdimage to create ELF images.  We need to do this anyway
   at some point and it *shouldn't* take long, but I say that with only
   a superficial knowledge of what is involved.

If you are in a big hurry, #1 is your best bet.  I will look into #2
a little bit.

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