Re: mounting root from NFS via ROOTDEVNAME

On Tue, 2013-01-29 at 09:17 +0000, Eggert, Lars wrote:
> On Jan 29, 2013, at 10:13, Lars Eggert <lars_at_netapp.com>
>  wrote:
> > On Jan 29, 2013, at 9:34, Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc_at_crodrigues.org> wrote:
> >> I recommend that you do not use ROOTDEVNAME, and instead
> >> you should follow the instructions which I wrote and contributed to the
> >> FreeBSD handbook:
> >> 
> >> "PXE Booting with an NFS Root File System"
> >> 
> >> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-pxe-nfs.html
> >> 
> >> The content of this document is the same as the text file which Rick
> >> Macklem pointed out (I wrote that too).
> > 
> > I had read both before, and they're very useful documents. Unfortunately, they don't fully apply to my case, since I'm not PXE-booting the system; it netboots the kernel from a custom loader. So once the kernel bootstraps, I need it to obtain an IP address and then NFS-mount root.
> 
> (Whoops, hit send by mistake.)
> 
> That's what I was trying to achieve with the BOOTP and BOOTP_WIRED_TO options.
> 
> Hm, I wonder if I could simply use the custom loader to netboot tftpboot, and then follow your instructions... Will try.

I think that's what I used to do before I switched to configuring the
boot file and root path via dhcp as well.  I could've sworn I used BOOTP
without BOOTP_NFSROOT, but perhaps that's just my muddled memory of what
I tried to do that never worked out.

I also think all of this is a bug.  It seems to me that BOOTP without
BOOTP_NFSROOT should obtain ip-related info from dhcp but use
ROOTDEVNAME as configured, perhaps with any dhcp-provided root path as a
fallback if there's a problem or ROOTDEVNAME is unconfigured.

-- Ian