Darren J Moffat wrote:
> 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.
>
I agree that nothing in this case should determine a required
architecture or design for a future better solution. I also had a side
conversation with Jan yesterday about some other alternatives.
My point was simply to express the concern that implementing the
partial, sparc-only solution might reduce the incentive to pursue a
better solution in the near future. Though not committing to a specific
solution, Jan did assure me that he has plans for future work in this area.
Scott
