> On Wed, Aug 08, 2007 at 10:05:24AM +0100, 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. > > In the boot-from-local-media case the boot loader knows how to read from > that media, and teaching it about the filesystem on that media isn't all > that difficult (compared to writing realmode device drivers, I imagine). > > In the network boot case the stack is much larger, particularly when > IPsec or RPCSEC_GSS are thrown into the picture. Expecting the boot > loader to be able to read files from the real root in this case seems > like asking a lot.
In the network boot case the boot loader also needs to know how to access and read from the remote source. Anything else would basically be magic. :) What is different is that we don't expose the entire client OS image to the booter anymore. We could go back to this, but as you point out it's not really necessary. -jan
