Strange NFS root booting behavior.

[John Clark]

Vladimir Botka schrieb:
>
> Hello,
>
> try the script /usr/share/examples/diskless/clone_root to create copy
> of the root. The procedure in
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-diskless.html
> works for me. Just an idea but did you compile the diskless kernel with
> "options     BOOTP_NFSROOT" ?

Well, I checked, and no those options are there. However, I was able to 
'boot' to a working system
on one piece of hardware, but not on another. While there could be a 
hardware problem, the place
where it fails is not in a 'hardware intensive' place, such as initing 
the PCI bus, accessing i/o devices,
but just after the initial rc script starts up. I've enabled the debug 
option in 'rc.initdiskless, and it gets
to the point of remounting '/' as read/write. Now of course in a 
multiple client setup this would not be
good, but in a single client, while it may not be the best thing to do, 
it shouldn't halt the init process and
go to the /bin/sh mode... And any attempt to 'ls /', or 'ls /bin' cause 
a 'bad file descriptor' message.

I'm at the moment recompiling the world on the working setup, and have 
put into a DISKLESS
conf file the appropriate options, but I don't think that is the 
ultimate problem in this case.

John Clark.