root filesystem over import

root filesystem over import

[Nick Owens]

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friends,

i've written some patches to allow booting a root filesystem over import
with optional aan. my end goal here is to have just a bootloader,
kernel, plan9.ini on fat partition, on a very small 128MB sd card, and
boot with the root over wifi on my X200. this is the first step.

if import is selected at the bootargs prompt or selected in
nobootprompt, import will dial $fs on the exportfs port(17007). setting
aan=1 in plan9.ini will enable aan for import.

this means you're actually booting your root from a cpu server, not
necessarily a fileserver.

it seems some time ago it was possible to boot over aan on labs
distribution, but i'm not sure if it used import. an excerpt from
http://9fans.net/archive/2005/03/215:

4570 free pages, 18280K bytes, 96680K swap
no usb daemon
no usbhid
root is from (aan, tcp, il, local)[tcp]: 
user[none]: axel
secstore password: 
version...time...

init: starting /bin/rc


my patches are at http://9.offblast.org/9front/patch/bootimport/

the import patch is necessary because if you do not strip the port from
the import dial string, netmkaddr will *not* use the aan port read from
the connection, and try to speak aan to the exportfs port.

thoughts?


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Re: [9front] root filesystem over import

[sl]

> thoughts?

We discussed similar ideas on IRC the other day, and someone
remembered that rsc had done some work on a "recover" file
system to manage to manage connections to a remote file
server:

/n/sources/contrib/paurea/recover4e.tgz

sl