[Debian-au] Solved! (was: Problems with NFS-mounted root)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Thursday, 17 July 2003 at 14:41:13 +1000, Chris Yeoh wrote:
> At 2003/7/17 13:51+0930  Greg 'groggy' Lehey writes:
>>     timeout 2
>>
>>     title Kernel 2.4.21
>>     root (nd)
>>     kernel (nd)/tftpboot/diskless/sat-gw/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/nfs
>>     nfsroot=192.109.197.82:/tftpboot/diskless/sat-gw ip=dhcp
>>
>> Ethereal shows that the kernel doesn't even try to access the NFS
>> server: there's no traffic at all after the kernel finishes loading.
>> I'm guessing that it has to be either an error in the grub config file
>> or in the kernel configuration.  Both are derived from a description
>> at http://bogmog.sourceforge.net/document_show.php3?doc_id=36.
>
> I had the exact same error in setting up an nfsroot box a few months
> ago.  I can't remember exactly what I did to fix it (there were a few
> issues along the way - firewalling myself off by accident being one of
> them :-) but at one stage I gave up using the ip=dhcp (saw some
> references to that being broken on certain 2.4.x kernels).
>
> So I have something like this:
>
> kernel (nd)/var/ftpd/vmlinuz-2.4.19-via root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=192.168.1.1:/data/blue_root ip=192.168.1.11:192.168.1.1:192.168.1.1:255.255.255.0:blue:eth0:off vga=0x318

Hah!  One line.  See my example above with two lines.  I removed the
\n, and now it works.  Thanks.

> If I remember correctly it dhcp's again after loading the kernel and
> that bit wasn't working. Of course I could be misremembering but it
> might be worth trying.

DHCP seems to work here.  What looks like being a problem is swap.  As
sfr pointed out, drivers/block/nbd.c states:

 * Note that you can not swap over this thing, yet. Seems to work but
 * deadlocks sometimes - you can not swap over TCP in general.

This is only part of the truth.  The original intention of NFS was to
run diskless clients, and both UNIX System V and derivatives and BSD
handle swap over NFS.  I'll investigate further.

Greg
--
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