BCCD:Log

2006-01-18

• I've got both the Dell and the bazaar node PXE booting off hopper. I can get to a Busybox prompt but no further though. The problem is that the kernel that the BCCD uses provides no NIC support until after the modules are loaded from singularity. The problem is that we need to load singularity over the network (NFS probably), but that's a chicken-and-the-egg problem.

2006-02-01

• Changing /linuxrc in root.bin to mount NFS, and then call pivot_root to change the current root filesystem from initrd to admin:/singularity (over NFS).

• We decided initrd is not needed. We took it out, and are no worse off than we were before.

• inittab's agetty entries are failing because devfsd is silently failing.

• Disabled /etc/init.d/net* because networking support is already included in the kernel.

2006-02-02

• Need to test run environments.
• Errors appear, but are not important.

2006-02-09

• Started using qemu
  • had to enable tun/tap in kernel
  • installed qemu 0.8.0 and associated kqemu on acl13
  • qemu -hda skylar.img -cdrom bccd.iso -boot d -net nic,vlan=1 -net tap,vlan=1

-hda <image name> says to use this file as a hard drive.
-cdrom <file name> says to use this file as a cdrom drive.  bonus if the file is already a cd (image)
-boot <bios device> says to boot from this device
-net [options] is how to initialize options within qemu
 - nic,vlan=1 says to create a network interface card for guest system, and create vlan with id 1
 - tap,vlan=1 says to associate tapX with vlan id 1

Also looked at UserModeLinux, but having troubles compiling the kernel.

2006-02-11

We've got User-mode-linux booting, although we're still stuck on making it a usable boot. At this point, qemu is still an option because it presents a packaged solution: with UML, we've got the kernel at boot time, which is not /exactly/ what happens when booting from the cd.