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Re: mkbsdimage



Hi Mike,

Just to let you know what is going on over here at OIT, we are using the
OSKit kernel for as a platform for development in our Operating Systems
course.

The ideal situation would be to build a kernel that could be booted on a
stand alone machine. Is it possible that we could use net-boot on a machine
that is running over a local loop-back adapter with no NIC installed?

Explain a bit more to me about your PXE boot loader. I have a bit of
resource here and would be willing to look into this a bit. What is used for
this environment and how might I go about setting up a similar thing here?

It is also possible that we boot from a linux based loader. What are the
possibilities here?

Thanks for any help. I am hoping this will work out and we can then use some
of our student resources/talent to help out the OSKit cause.

Cheers,

   Jim


----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Hibler" <mike@fast.cs.utah.edu>
To: <oit_student@yahoo.com>
Cc: <oskit-users@fast.cs.utah.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2001 6:01 PM
Subject: 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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