BIOS

[Steffen Grunewald]

On Thu, Aug 09, 2007 at 10:42:41AM +0200, Thomas Lange wrote:
> >>>>> On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 09:37:02 +0200, Henning Fehrmann <henning.fehrmann at aei.mpg.de> said:
> 
>     > we are interested in flashing a BIOS image and in manipulating the NVRAM of the motherboard 
>     > automatically.
> Wow. Do you really need this?
> 
>     > Unfortunately, using certain vendors, the access to the NVRAM is not straightforward.
>     > These vendors are offering DOS tools only, to write in the NVRAM, hence, we have to boot
>     > a DOS image and here starts the trouble.
> You can boot a DOS or floppy image using PXE. This is how a
> pxelinux.cfg looks like for booting a floppy image: 
> 
> default dos
> label dos
>  kernel memdisk
>  append keeppxe initrd=floppy.img
> 
> But AFAIR I had no success, because the dos flashing utilities seems
> to wanna have a real floppy, not a fake of a floppy.

It worked here, but I think that's something Henning has got running too.
The problem is to tell the server to swap its PXE config file for this particular
machine *after* the flash has been completed but *before* rebooting (automatically
or by power cycle/IPMI reset). It'd be necessary to send some kind of "signal"
to the server (a dummy tftp request is what I've done in the past, at least from
a tomsrtbt image I used to perform some partitioning magic). Therefore, it would
be nice to have a network stack under freedos (which the BIOS flash disks nowadays
are based on).

>     > Optimally, using the DOS environment flashes the BIOS, sets the 
>     > NVRAM and sends a message to the FAI server to prepare the next boot of the clients for the
>     > installation.
> You could send a message to the faimond which can change the pxelinux configuration.

That's the problem: to get a reasonable message *somewhere* you'd need a TCP/IP
stack. Or am I missing something?

Cheers,
 Steffen