Booting qemu Pegasos II over TFTP

Has anyone managed to get the Pegasos II to boot the kickstart modules from qemu's built-in TFTP server? The boot command just says "error while trying to load or boot" when it fails, which is useless for debugging why it failed.

Being able to load the kickstart modules from a TFTP server makes it easier to swap kernel modules in and out.

Hans

I've tried using OpenFirmware's debug facility (e.g., debug boot), and see it calls: load, then open-dev, open, decode-unit, open, decode-unit (5 times in a ro), and then close.

A regular boot from hd:0 will have a bunch of decode-unit, open, decode-unit, open calls.

Hans

@all

I'm starting to suspect that network booting only works with the ethernet built into the Marvell Discovery II chipset... which isn't emulated at present.

The Pegasos II SmartFirmware documentation has a section on network booting, so it should work. However, I have no indication that it gets as far as sending a packet on the network.

Hans

Oh, that's a pity. If that is not emulated then I guess it is not possible to get online on that level and boot from the network. But I am not experienced with it nor have I tried to do something like that.

@HansQuote:

If this chip is well documented we should integrate it into the Qemu Pegasos 2 emulation probably it would also solve the network problems that still exist on some machines. Maybe Balaton could help with this or someone else, I am unfortunately out as I have no programming knowledge

@Maijestro
I have docs on that but it's a complex device so not keen on emulating it as there are already other network cards emulated. It's possible that the pegasos2 firmware does not have an rtl8139 driver and only supports the on board ethernet, I don't know and we have no source to check. But maybe bboot can help with this too, it can't do tftp but editing the zip on the host may be easier and scriptable so it could be almost as good as using tftp. (Tftp support could also be added to bboot but then it would also need a network driver so it would become more complex and I've only found small driver for ne2k not rtl8139 so I won't consider adding it to bboot yet, maybe using the zip initrd can work for now.)