* Bernie Zenis (bzenis@mac.com) 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. Hope that cleared stuff up a bit. Cheers, Emiel -- Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles, called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking. Electrons travel at the speed of light, which in most American homes is 110 volts per hour. This is very fast. In the time it has taken you to read this sentence so far, an electron could have traveled all the way from San Francisco to Hackensack, New Jersey, although God alone knows why it would want to. The five main kinds of electricity are alternating current, direct current, lightning, static, and European. Most American homes have alternating current, which means that the electricity goes in one direction for a while, then goes in the other direction. This prevents harmful electron buildup in the wires. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" _______________________________________________ darwin-kernel mailing list | darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/darwin-kernel Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.