[Thinbsd] nfs

[Francois Tigeot]

On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 12:57:05PM -0400, brian at aljex.com wrote:
> First off, ThinBSD is Awsome!
> Thankyou thankyou thankyou for putting it together.
> 
> I've been trying to get any form of pxebooting thin client together for a while
> and none of the things I've found wee documented well enough, or they assumed
> things that aren't true for me.
> 
> I got thinbsd going in minutes.

I'm glad to find it to be useful :-)

> I'm using it on a epia-v board that was originally a WalMart $300 Lindows box,
> but which I stuffed into an old blue painted steel Netgear hub!
> http://nj.aljex.com/Hubpc/Photo_061805_021.jpg
> http://nj.aljex.com/Hubpc/Photo_062005_005.jpg
 
Nice box ! Gives me some ideas...
 
> now the question:
> I get it that it's one of thinbsd's specific design goals that it runs on an mfs
> root instead of an nfs root.
> 
> but I happen to want to run on nfs instead of ram. What things do I change?

The kernel would have to be the first thing: there is no NFS support in
ThinBSD's kernel and the root device is hardcoded to md0.

IMHO, you should start from FreeBSD's GENERIC kernel.

There are other things needed such as setting the root in the dhcp
server but I haven't done any nfs booting in a while and I am probably
forgetting some stuff...

> Ideally I'd love to be able to make a nice big 512M or 1G version of thinbsd's
> mfsroot image and mount it and nfs export it and alter the loader so that it
> tries to mount nfs instead of ramdisk.

For the loader part, the stock FreeBSD one should be sufficient. ThinBSD
loader is the same one, just compiled with LOADER_TFTP_SUPPORT=yes.

With such a gigantic disk size, you could also use a more complete FreeBSD
userland. make world DESTDIR=/mfs is your friend. No need to cherry pick
binaries in this case.
 
> Also, I made a nice boot splash for thinbsd. I was able to take vesa.ko  and
> splash_bmp.ko from my
> regular freebsd (which luckily is also 5.4 and i686) and just drop them into
> /tftpboot/boot/kernel & the bmp into /tftpboot/boot/modules and edit
> loader.conf and it works.
 
> It looks great on my plasma tv which is what I use the thin client on. :)
 
> ---loader.conf---
> [...]
> vesa_load="YES"
> splash_bmp_load="YES"
> bitmap_load="YES"
> bitmap_name="thinbsd_splash_2.bmp"
> bitmap_type="splash_image_data"
> ---loader.conf---
> 
> thinbsd_splash_2.bmp:
> http://www.aljex.com/bkw/thinbsd/

Nice.

If I find the time, I will try to look how to automate the addition of the
vesa stuff in the kernel tarball.

> Since it all goes into tftpboot it doesn't touch the size of mfsroot at all.

I slimmed-down the kernel and bootloader part to be able to put all of
ThinBSD on small flash cards. With only two modules and an image this
should still be possible howewer :)

-- 
Francois Tigeot
http://www.zefyris.com/