booting other oses

ron minnich rminnich at lanl.gov
Wed Aug 25 09:17:00 CEST 2004


On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Dave Aubin wrote:

>   What is your goal to want to use Linux bios?  If your goal is to get 
> It to load a Linux kernel, then try etherboot.  

goodness, this question takes us back to our roots. 

The fact is, the linux kernel is just about the best thing you can use to
boot another kernel!

Dave, think about this: are you planning to write etherboot drivers for
myrinet, quadrics, infiniband, SCI, or other new networks? How about all
those ugly, complicated SCSI disk systems? If yes, you're nuts and you are
going to duplicate a lot of work that Linux does better. If no, then
etherboot can't even be used on our 1024-node Pink cluster (which has no
Ethernet, only myrinet). 

Another weird thing we've found: Linux, on faster machines with lots of 
network interfaces in them, boots nodes faster than etherboot! weird but 
true.

I think you are not looking at a big enough picture. Etherboot is fine for 
a lot of cases, but if you can put Linux in flash, it's a LOT better, and 
as the processors get faster, Linux is faster too. 

ron




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