Specifying root mount options on diskless boot.

[Peter Jeremy]

[I'm not sure if -stable is the best list for this but anyway...]

I'm trying to convert an old laptop running FreeBSD 8.0 into a diskless
client (since its internal HDD is growing bad spots faster than I can
repair them).  I have it pxebooting nicely and running with an NFS root
but it then reports locking problems: devd, syslogd, moused (and maybe
others) lock their PID file to protect against multiple instances.
Unfortunately, these daemons all start before statd/lockd and so the
locking fails and reports "operation not supported".

It's not practical to reorder the startup sequence to make lockd start
early enough (I've tried).

Since the filesystem is reserved for this client, there's no real need
to forward lock requests across the wire and so specifying "nolockd"
would be another solution.  Looking through sys/nfsclient/bootp_subr.c,
DHCP option 130 should allow NFS mount options to be specified (though
it's not clear that the relevant code path is actually followed because
I don't see the associated printf()s anywhere on the console.  After
getting isc-dhcpd to forward this option (made more difficult because
its documentation is incorrect), it still doesn't work.

Understanding all this isn't helped by kenv(8) reporting three different
sets of root filesystem options:
boot.nfsroot.path="/tank/m3"
boot.nfsroot.server="192.168.123.200"
dhcp.option-130="nolockd"
dhcp.root-path="192.168.123.200:/tank/m3"
vfs.root.mountfrom="nfs:server:/tank/m3"
vfs.root.mountfrom.options="rw,tcp,nolockd"

And the console also reports conflicting root definitions:
Trying to mount root from nfs:server:/tank/m3
NFS ROOT: 192.168.123.200:/tank/m3

Working through all these:
boot.nfsroot.* appears to be initialised by sys/boot/i386/libi386/pxe.c
but, whilst nfsclient/nfs_diskless.c can parse boot.nfsroot.options,
there's no code to initialise that kenv name in pxe.c

dhcp.* appears to be initialised by lib/libstand/bootp.c - which does
include code to populate boot.nfsroot.options (using vendor specific
DHCP option 20) but this code is not compiled in.  Further studying
of bootp.c shows that it's possible to initialise arbitrary kenv's
using DHCP options 246-254 - but the DHCPDISCOVER packets do not
request these options so they don't work without special DHCP server
configuration (to forward options that aren't requested).

vfs.root.* is parsed out of /etc/fstab but, other than being
reported in the console message above, it doesn't appear to be
used in this environment (it looks like the root entry can be
commented out of /etc/fstab without problem).

My final solution was to specify 'boot.nfsroot.options="nolockd"' in
loader.conf - and this seems to actually work.

It seems rather unfortunate that FreeBSD has code to allow NFS root
mount options to be specified via DHCP (admittedly in several
incompatible ways) but none actually work.  A quick look at -current
suggests that the situation there remains equally broken.

Has anyone else tried to use any of this?  And would anyone be interested
in trying to make it actually work?

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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