Mark Weinstein mark@dotcomlive.net writes:
Eric,
Can you help me? I was reading an article about the LinuxBIOS and had a few questions. Your name was at the bottom of the article, so I thought I would drop you a line. I hope you don¹t mind and if you do, please disregard this message. :) Bear with me here... I am new to the whole LinuxBIOS thing and am having a hard time trying to find answers.
Asking on the LinuxBIOS list is probably the best way, questions and some answers forwarded there.
- I use Linux boxes in a clustering environment and would LOVE to have the
nodes boot themselves without having to load images from the network, etc. Is this doable?
Personally I think booting from a local hard driver is a less manageable way to do things. I have booted a 1000 node cluster over the network in under a minute.
But there is support for booting from a hard drive.
- I use a RedHat 2.4.18 based kernel with quite a few kernel mods. How
much space is on the DOC (is it 8mb?) and will the OS fit on it?
The DOC has 8MByte of space, yes. I don't use it and I don't see the need you can load a kernel from other places. And in fact I consider it a poor choice for any but an embedded user to hard code their kernel, into the ROM.
- If the answer to #2 is yes, then can you reflash the chips from a server
or some other machine and then have them reboot without taking the machines apart each time?
Yes. Though I try and keep reflashing down to just BIOS upgrades and not kernel upgrades.
- If you can coot the OS from he chip, how do you have access to all of
your libraries, etc? Would you simply mount SOME file shares with libraries and apps via NFS?
I am VERY interested in building some servers with LinuxBIOS, but I am also very confused. :) Any help you can give me would be GREATLY appreciated!
Talk to the other people on the list. I have provided the answers I can, but you are coming from an extremely different perspective than I am.
Eric
On 21 Oct 2002, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
Personally I think booting from a local hard driver is a less manageable way to do things. I have booted a 1000 node cluster over the network in under a minute.
yep.
The DOC has 8MByte of space, yes. I don't use it and I don't see the need you can load a kernel from other places. And in fact I consider it a poor choice for any but an embedded user to hard code their kernel, into the ROM.
Here is where Eric and I agree to disagree :-)
We really like having a kernel in DoC or IDE flash for our bproc Single System Image clusters. We boot a linux from these things and it lets us do all our cluster management over myrinet ... no ethernet needed. I don't think it is really possible to do this type of thing via (e.g.) etherboot for a long time.
Note, however, that all we do with that Linux in DoC is use it to boot another linux. On our Alpha cluster, once we had flashed the Linux and Initrd into flash, it stayed that way for a year (until we turned it off in fact).
Yes. Though I try and keep reflashing down to just BIOS upgrades and not kernel upgrades.
That's for sure. But several companies (including lnxi.com) have done a great job of making flash less failure-prone with a jumperless backup scheme.
- If you can coot the OS from he chip, how do you have access to all of
your libraries, etc? Would you simply mount SOME file shares with libraries and apps via NFS?
We are done with NFS here. We are using V9FS, which in conjunction with Viro's changes to Linux (2.4.19 and later) give you private name spaces for Linux, which are just incredibly nice. We're finding this to be pretty robust, see http://v9fs.sourceforge.net.
ron
Ronald G Minnich rminnich@lanl.gov writes:
On 21 Oct 2002, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
Personally I think booting from a local hard driver is a less manageable way to do things. I have booted a 1000 node cluster over the network in under a minute.
yep.
The DOC has 8MByte of space, yes. I don't use it and I don't see the need you can load a kernel from other places. And in fact I consider it a poor choice for any but an embedded user to hard code their kernel, into the ROM.
Here is where Eric and I agree to disagree :-)
More or less. I think having a kernel that is part of your bootloader in flash as a reasonable thing to do, beoboot is currently quite heavy for a bootloader though.
We really like having a kernel in DoC or IDE flash for our bproc Single System Image clusters. We boot a linux from these things and it lets us do all our cluster management over myrinet ... no ethernet needed. I don't think it is really possible to do this type of thing via (e.g.) etherboot for a long time.
Actually I suspect I could get it running in a week or two. It should not take too much to strip down the myrinet driver...
Ron you want to follow the linux kernel list and help me test the linux booting linux code?
Eric
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ebiederman＠lnxi.com -
Ronald G Minnich