network boot

[John-Mark Gurney]

Miles Nordin wrote this message on Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 03:18 -0400:
> Is there a way to netboot FreeBSD/sparc64?

Yes, I did it a couple years ago, so I'm a bit hazy on the details...

> I'm coming to FreeBSD from NetBSD, where I netboot NetBSD/sparc64 and
> just about everything except PeeCees, so I already know how to set up
> rarp, dhcp, tftp, NFS.  Also I was able to cat the split FreeBSD
> release chunks and untar them---I don't know if you're supposed to do
> that, but I did it and poked around---so I have something like a root
> filesystem and am able to read man pages.

That's basicly what the install does for your.. :)

> However I don't understand FreeBSD's booting process, and I don't see
> where to get the second-stage loader binary to feed OpenPROM over
> tftp, something like NetBSD's /usr/mdec/ofwboot.net.  

You should be able to use /boot/loader for that...  (from your extracted
bin.?? files)

> Also something like the diskless(8) man page to explain how the
> second-stage loader likes to load, on NetBSD the kernel but on FreeBSD
> I guess it has to load a great many things like the several files that
> make up the rest of the bootloader and kernel modules and whatever,
> once I have the tftp second-stage loader how do I direct the booting
> system to these other files?

http://people.freebsd.org/~murray/sparc64/install.html

Though it looks like you should use the /boot/loader instead of the one
specified in the doc (since they don't exist anymore)..

Hope the doc helps...

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."