2006/525: New Boot Sparc

[Darren J Moffat]

Scott Rotondo wrote:
> The idea for a long-term solution (having the boot loader read multiple 
> files into memory instead of a single archive) sounds like a good one.

I'm not sure that is the best solution in the network boot case. 
Consider that one of the reasons we designed wanboot with a downloadable 
archive was to *reduce* the number of files transferred over the network 
and to reduce the number of files we had to verify with an hmac.  This 
is important not just for wanboot (which should get ported to x86) and 
also the netboot for NFS and iSCSI root cases as well.

The root cause here seems to be that there are multiple copies of a 
file, one in the root filesystem and one in the archive filesystem.  It 
isn't that the boot system loads an archive.   If instead we could fix 
the problem so that there is never the possibility of the root 
filesystem being out of sync with the archive that would help.  There 
are possible ways to do this - I shared some of my thoughts privately 
with Jan yesterday and he had already looked a similar way of solving it 
but it is too complex for now.

I just don't want the outcome of this fast-track to imply that the 
future *better* solution requires the boot loader to be reading multiple 
files.

-- 
Darren J Moffat