Requirements and Decisions (As Specified by LANL)

• Starting point: the current status of netboot on PCs

  • netboot has been available on Suns for more than 15 years
  • on PCs, BIOS and PROM must be in 16-bit mode - 8086 (6MHz, 25 years old CPU) emulation, all sorts of weird stuff such as near and far pointers, etc
  • standards: NIC boot model has to conform to NDIS2 (16-bit Windows model), thanks to Microsoft and Intel

• Requirements

  • load something onto CPU that can load boot parameters over network, find out what to do, and load an OS kernel
  • open source ג€“ nothing proprietary
  • portable: no (or minimal) assembly, support a variety of NICs, motherboards
  • avoid reinventing the wheel ג€“ try to use code that supports lots of hardware etc
  • support standard protocols ג€“ NFS, bootp, etc

• Write netboot from scratch or use a minimal Linux kernel?

  • custom netboot will duplicate OS (Sun netboot ג€“ no support for AFS, msdos, etc)
  • no real space savings (netboot ג€“ 128K, minimal Linux ג€“ 300K)