Etherboot in the BIOS?

[ron minnich]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2003, Andrew Sterling Hanenkamp wrote:
> According to the FAQ, it's possible to boot Linux using Etherboot with 
> LinuxBIOS.  This appears to be a pretty simple and straightforward 
> process, but I was wandering if it were possible to render the system 
> unbootable?  That is, is it posible that overwriting the BIOS will cause 
> boot to fail (because of misconfiguration, etc.)?  If this happens, is 
> there anyway to recover?  What are the pitfalls and how can I avoid them?

There is a fallback bios mechanism for linuxbios, and in V2 it is easy to 
build fallback/normal images. It's quite an interesting design, Eric 
developed it, and it's worth a read of the code to see how it works.

We use this fallback system on the 1024 node pink system, and it has 
served us well through many flash cycles. 

ron