svn commit: r246220 - user/sbruno/pxe_http_head

[Andre Oppermann]

On 02.02.2013 00:09, Craig Rodrigues wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 11:32 AM, Andre Oppermann <andre at freebsd.org <mailto:andre at freebsd.org>> wrOn
>
>
>     While I don't want to discourage from this work the IPXE package
>     (formerly etherboot) already provides HTTP as well as iSCSI, FCoE
>     and AoE to load the kernel.  It also provides a nice scripting
>     language where the scrips can even be loaded through HTTP.  IPXE
>     is GPLv2 licensed though.
>
>     --
>     Andre
>
>
> Does iPXE work with FreeBSD?  It would be good to see newer alternatives
> to PXE/TFTP, especially things that work over HTTP.
>
> Based on this thread: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2013-January/039334.html
> I am wondering if there are areas of the NFS root mount code that
> we can clean up so it works better with things like iPXE.
>
> Right now there are a lot of preprocessor macros that can be enabled
> in the kernel (NFS_ROOT, BOOTP*, etc.).
> If this stuff could be cleaned up so that instead of compile time macros,
> these features get converted to run-time behaviors that can be triggered
> by kernel environment varialbes that are documented, that would be nicer IMHO.

Based on the recent discussions I've started a local branch two days
ago to do exactly that and chop/merge bootp_subr.c and nfs_diskless.c
into the network interface, bootp/dhcp and nfs parts.  All of which
gets tied into vfs_mountroot.c to work the same as ufs, zfs or md root
mounting.  Downloading a md root image via HTTP as another option is
the goal. :)

-- 
Andre