> Well, I don't think you would need or use pfinet to boot from a networked > storage, although I am also not clear on exactly what it would require. You > would probably use a different bootstrapping filesystem than ext2fs, but > even this can be loaded over the net with GRUB (which is what I meant > above).
I was referring to network devices or nfs. > In any way, a diskless Hurd system can now be implement without adding > network support in serverboot. > > Oh, and of course partitions can be handled in user space without adding > partition support to serverboot, too. Well, what you are dealing with is a the chicken and egg type problem. If a root device is a network store, the server will need to open a network connection using socket () (or another similar function which accesses pfinet). The implementation of socket () opens /servers/socket/2 to get a file descriptor. However, as this would happen before there is a root file system, the function will fail. What is needed is either a way to specify how to access a particular pfinet server through, e.g. an environment variable (which would be a big win as this would permit us to use multiple pfinet servers transparently) or implement something equivalent to pivot_root in Linux. Either way a new mechanism will need to be added to pfinet to allow authorized users to connected it to other nodes (e.g. via the fsys_forward rpc) and possibly disconnect it from nodes (to permit a form of pivot_root -- otherwise a reference to the old root file system would persist).
