forcedeth

[Ludwig Schwardt]

> On Sat, 8 Jul 2006, Holger Levsen wrote:
> Sounds interesting, but is it really possible when debian compiles almost 
> everything av modules, and relies on initrd for booting? But if 
> CONFIG_ROOT_NFS is statically linked, maybe you could use an initrd image 
> from an nfs share?
>
> Using standard kernels would also make it impossible to create a boot floppy, 
> but it's probably only a matter of time before that would be impossible even 
> with a custom kernel. Anyway, I wouldn't miss the boot floppy since booting 
> from CD is much faster. And most network cards can PXE boot these days - I 
> only use a boot CD on a few old boxes with old network cards which don't 
> honour next-server (we don't have the dhcp server on the fai server).

I created a version of make-fai-bootfloppy with initrd support for exactly this 
situation (nforce network card)... Back then (2003), I did not have joy with 
forcedeth and used the NVidia supplied nvnet driver instead (even created a 
debian package for that). With this driver you had no choice but to compile 
it as a module, and to get fai to work you therefore needed an initrd kernel.

Nowadays forcedeth seem OK, and you can compile it into your kernel without too 
much worries. If someone is interested, I can share the make-fai-bootfloppy 
stuff, but it might need some massaging to work with the latest fai.

Regards,
Ludwig