On 3/14/06, Shudong Zhou <szhou at billybob.sfbay.sun.com> wrote: > > Noah, > > First of all, congratulations on the great work you are doing! > > > In inetboot (also ufsboot and hsfsboot), when control is transferred to > the > > kernel, the NFS and network stack(tcp/ip, rarp, bootparamd) modules have > not > > yet been loaded. The kernel needs to callback the services (called boot > > service in code base) of the inetboot bootstrap to read in those > required > > modules from root fs and link them, pretty complex. > > > > In multiboot, the boot_archive that includes those modules is mounted as > > root fs via ramdisk. It is much simplier for the kernel to load and link > > them. > > The different between x86 and sparc is supposed to be transient. > Sun is working hard to make sparc boot ramdisk based as well.
also powerpc!! > The trick is the run time linking that reads in modules one by one. so > what > > is the benefit of it in kernel startup and why not just link those > required > > modules in build time (like Xen), which may posibbly save some booting > > seconds? > > Because the boot path can't be predetermined, there are always driver > modules you need to link in at run time. Unlike Linux, we don't ask > sysadmin to recompile the kernel in order to boot from a new device. > Once we move to ramdisk-based boot, the linking time will be fast. that makes lots of sense and I think I do need to look at the krtld stuff for details. Thanks very much! Noah Shudong > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/powerpc-discuss/attachments/20060314/9e3cf123/attachment.html>
