Subject: Re: Mounting NFS root FS
From: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
To: Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>
Cc: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@linux01.gwdg.de>,
       William Estrada <MrUmunhum@popdial.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2006 02:05:10 -0500
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On Sun, 2006-12-03 at 07:02 +0100, Willy Tarreau wrote:

> That's a valid point, but in fact, building with NFS client and serial
> port support in the kernel on some archs is as common as building with
> IDE driver and VGA console in the kernel on x86. With some architectures
> used in light networked workstations, it's very common to boot from the
> network (sparc & parisc come to mind, sorry to those I forgot), hence
> this common practise.

I have no influence over the distributions' choice of kernel compiler
options. The fact is, though, that few of them support nfsroot out of
the box. AFAICS FC-6 is one of those that appears not to.

> > As for the initramfs support, hpa has assured me that his klibc
> > distribution already has a full solution for NFS mounting on current
> > kernels.
> 
> That's again where we see the limits of this ever-developping 2.6.
> I'm not saying that doing this from initramfs+tools is a bad solution,
> since it solves lots of problems, it's just that it is *much* different
> from what was previously done.
> 
> People who have installed a distro on their machines will not be
> able to upgrade their kernel past a certain point by hand. Upgrading
> distro packages in such environments is generally not always an
> option (particularly boot packages such as boot loader and kernel),
> because the boot server is not necessarily running on the same
> OS/distro, and sometimes the kernel needs different build options.

Most people that run nfsroot systems do so because that makes
provisioning of new machines easy: if you only have one system image,
then upgrading it is less of a challenge.

> Then the remaining solution to get stability and security fixes
> is often to [cross-]compile a more recent kernel, and to put it
> on the boot server. Fortunately Adrian maintains 2.6.16 :-/

No comment.

Trond

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