status information

Ronald G. Minnich rminnich at lanl.gov
Mon Nov 1 10:45:01 CET 2004


On Fri, 29 Oct 2004, Eric W. Biederman wrote:

> As for size, the beoboot userland is one of the reasons why you are
> still using CF.  But that can be tuned.

No, beoboot really is not the reason at all! 

We had a cluster at SC '03 with linuxbios/linux/beoboot in the flash part,
NOT the cf. That booted over ethernet (faster than etherboot, which was
interesting). As soon as you put IB drivers or myrinet drivers or quadrics
drivers into the picture, you need the CF. That's just the way it is.
Those drivers and their support code push the kernel size over the edge.

Plus, on Pink, the 1024 node cluster, we have a fallback/normal linuxbios,
fallback/normal FILO in flash; the fallback/normal kernel and initrd are
in CF. There's no room at all to do this in a 1 MB flash part. 

Use of CF is not a beoboot/kexec issue at all.

ron




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