Re: P autoconfig doesn't work in 2.3.46

[ADAM Sulmicki]

> It sounds to me like you want bootp support in the kernel because the
> mkinitrd script is 
> not easy to use.  Solvable problem, not necessarily a kernel problem
> though...
> 
> I just sent a patch into Linus which fixes IP autoconfig, but Alan sez
> "it has-got-to-go" (with elaboration) so I don't think your plea is
> going to get farther than 2.4.x. :)

I think that's more than just that.

when you have a problem you want to be able to quickly have a netbootable
kernel not spend time making initrd images.

One could argue that you should have ready emergency disks ahead of time,
but in my experience by time you need a boot disk something changes and
they are not what you expect them be. for example I have there this box
with 460+ days of uptime... the sources for the kernel I used to compile
it are long gone, heck I even don't remember what ethernet card it has
anymore (dmesg output is long gone, an I'm too lazy to open the box up,
but for sure it is not a pci card.. )

Another issue is development of new machines. when you port to a new 
machine, it come out handy be to able to simply netboot it. 

perhaps it would be a good idea to instead putting everything into
initrd, to follow the patch netbsd took and simply make two stage
boot loader. I think it might be more flexible than initrd is. 

I haven't looked at it for a while, but IIRC the first stage would 
do basic booting (bootp?) then load the proper kernel and pass 
ip options to it.