[OpenIndiana-discuss] Can we abandon wanboot?

[James Carlson]

On 08/07/14 11:08, RJ Bergeron wrote:
> For SPARC in particular, I believe wanboot *is* that thing. Certainly from
> checking the file contents of osol-0906-ai-sparc, there is no inetboot
> (which is what the DHCP/RARP process would typically use to boot). If we
> stop supporting wanboot, it will be impossible to netboot SPARC.

No, inetboot is the thing on SPARC.  If you don't have it, then you
can't do standard PXE DHCP or RARP booting.  The wanboot image supports
only the Sun-special DHCP+HTTP booting process.

The two are quite different in operation.  With inetboot, it actually
uses NFS to mount the install image from the server (after the booter is
loaded and running via TFTP).

If it exists, you should have an inetboot image here:

/usr/platform/*/lib/fs/nfs/inetboot

The source should be roughly here:

https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/master/usr/src/psm/stand/boot/sparc/common/inetboot.c

I'm pretty sure that "AI" is the Automated Installer, which postdates
the regular network installation process by quite a bit.  I'm also
pretty sure that AI works *only* with wanboot and doesn't support
inetboot at all.

-- 
James Carlson         42.703N 71.076W         <carlsonj at workingcode.com>