>Except NICs you mean? Including NICs.
>Doesn't Grub (at least Grub1) use the etherboot/rom-o-matic NIC drivers? Not for Solaris as Sun ships it. The grub that comes with Solaris is loaded in memory using PXE (over the wire) and then the Grub PXE driver continues to use PXE to bootstrap the kernel. (So you can even download a Solaris kernel over the net without there being Solaris support for your network driver). The rom-o-matic drivers can be used too but they require grub to be booted from other media (floppy, USB, CD, DVD, harddisk) first. I use a special grub version to netboot an old laptop without PXE support. I boot grub from the harddisk and then select "network boot/install" from the grub menu The picture Jan drew is accurate: a system can only boot from devices the firmware supports. BIOS or Openboot makes no difference. Of course, the OS you then load may be more limited and not allow booting from the device you've just downloaded the bootloader from. (E.g., old Solaris boot was more limited than some BIOSes). The best you can hope for is a boot loader loaded from any of the supported devices (on SPARC, that would be net, disk, CD/DVD) and then boot a bootloader which understands the device you actually want to boot from (USB, firewire?) >As I said, I wasn't aware, that the ongoing Grub2 sparc port just sits on top >of OBP. >I thought it includes native code to talk to USB. That is possible but it will need to be loaded in memory first; and it can't be loaded from USB because the OBP won't let it. >Ah, that is what I asked you a few lines above. >Yeah. >Or loaded via Grub1 floppy, where no PXE is present. >And then interfacing with the NIC directly. >Damn, I had been hoping from outside (never worked through the grub sources) >this would be handled similarily with a certain set of USB controllers. >Not so :-( Well, loading grub from floppy and then using USB boot could be possible. Casper _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
