Re: Can Darwin Live Without Disks?
Re: Can Darwin Live Without Disks?
- Subject: Re: Can Darwin Live Without Disks?
- From: Bernie Zenis <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 13:36:45 -0400
On Sunday, September 8, 2002, at 08:02 PM, Emiel Kollof wrote:
* Bernie Zenis (email@hidden) wrote:
I've heard of netbooting but I don't know any details. Is nothing
loaded
from a local disk? That is, does firmware make a network connection and
download the needed files? Does a netbooted machine still need a local
writable disk? Can VM work over a network? Does Darwin need to have
swap
file(s)? If RAM is large enough, can everything happen over the
network?
Netbooting a UNIX usually depends on a BOOTP/DHCP/RARP to get an ip
number (which protocol is used depends on the hardware). Open Firmware
on newer (New world) macs is pretty content with DHCP. Then with tftp a
boot image is downloaded. This boot image contains something that
understands some remote file system like perhaps Appletalk or NFS. NFS
is more common. The boot image in turn fetched the kernel from that
network filesystem and boots it.
Usually there are these approches (assuming NFS):
1. The kernel knows NFS and can use a NFS root right away, and boots on.
2. A ramdisk is set up with a barebones root and boots on.
Swapping over NFS is quite common, but not recommended. Disks are slow,
but networks are usually slower.
The way Mac OS X/Darwin works is probably along those lines. So yes, in
theory it could function without a disk, given enough tinkering.
So, it isn't quite there yet; but, it could be? Does anybody out there
think that Darwin will eventually have the capabilities to work from a
diskless (or from a non writable disk) machine?
I know hardware is a lot more robust these days; however, I think that
it would be a great selling point from the Mac to have an OS that runs
without disks. "Without disks" can mean a user/sys admin decides not to
use a disk, the disk crashes, power is out and the disk(s) are "shut
down" with the system still going, or whatever you can think of. Maybe
it would only really be a selling point for Mac servers and computer
geeks (like me :-).
Hope that cleared stuff up a bit.
Yes, thank you.
-- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
LOL
-Bernie
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