Is it possible to netboot a FreeRunner?

Jeff Sadowski jeff.sadowski at gmail.com
Sun Aug 31 17:34:35 CEST 2008


You would probably  need a driver built into uboot to recognize a usb
network device or maybe a way in uboot to setup wifi. I know my avaya
wireless phones look for new images on my tftp server when they boot.
Maybe if there was a way to replace a live kernel that might work for
you?

On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 9:01 AM, Jan Keymeulen <spam at keymeulen.com> wrote:
> On Sun 31 August 2008 om 14:30:11 GMT Al Johnson told us:
>> On Saturday 30 August 2008, Andreas Zuber wrote:
>> > Am Samstag 30 August 2008 10:06:01 schrieb Torfinn Ingolfsen:
>> > > Hi,
>> > >
>> > > I just got a strange idea into my head. So I'll ask a possibly silly
>> > > question:
>> > >
>> > > Is it possble to netboot a Neo FreeRunner? Can you netboot at all over
>> > > usb? Does uboot have netbot support?
>> >
>> > I know uboot from an other embedded system, where it was installed, and it
>> > is able to download a kernel from a tftp server to the memory. This is done
>> > by the "tftpboot" command.
>> > There is also a "dhcp" command so uboot can get an ip for the network.
>> >
>> > But i dont know if uboot can handle the usb as a network device. Someone
>> > has already tried this?
>>
>> I think it can be done, but you will now need a custom kernel. When moving the
>> USB ethernet gadget driver from built-in to module Andy Green (IIRC)
>> mentioned that someone needed it builtin for netbooting with rootfs on NFS.
>
> Booting with rootfs on nfs != netbooting.
>
> Netbooting gets a kernel from a tftpserver, while rootfs on nfs requires
> a kernel already loaded. The problem here is that it's uncertain whether
> uboot can handle the usb network interface (or wireless or bluetooth).
>
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