[gPXE] I need a little ram disk after gPXE boot and before AoEsanboot

[Shao Miller]

The Mad One wrote:
>
> ...The subject says it all, I need a little ram disk less than 1MB in 
> size, just after gPXE loads but before the AoE sanboot, is it possible ?
>

Yes.  Support your boot sequence goes gPXE -> MEMDISK -> gPXE -> 
sanboot.  That satisfies your criteria.  I suspect that you'd rather do 
this, however:

gPXE -> sanboot -> GRUB4DOS -> RAM disk

> i'm not sure if MEMDISK is suitable nor how to do it, i need NTFS on 
> that RamDisk & a drive letter.
>

An NTFS filesystem cannot be made on a device of less than 1 MB.  I 
think what you meant to say is, "I want a floppy disk image to use as a 
RAM disk which has an NTFS driver on it so I can get a drive letter for 
the NTFS filesystem on the AoE SAN."  Is this accurate?  If so, I 
respectfully request that you try to include such detail in your future 
questions to mailing-lists.  Not everyone is familiar with your 
situation, so you might have to spell it out.

> If the previous is possible, is it possible to get gPXE to load a file 
> from TFTP to that ramdisk ? (through a script to load a file that is 
> named after the actual IP or MAC address of the machine running gPXE & 
> rename it to a specific name inside the ram disk.)
>

Now you're asking for something more...  I recommend attacking your 
problem one step at a time.  It seems that you want a RAM disk which can 
access an AoE SAN at the same time as you want to be able to use gPXE 
for general networking, such as a DOS image with an UNDI driver and TFTP 
on it.  Briefly, I will suggest that you have either SAN or UNDI, but 
not both.  I say that because some experiments of my own have failed.  
Someone else on this list might suggest something different.

> Well, i hope this was clear enough & wasn't out of topic.
>

The network-booting aspects are on-topic.  NTFS DOS drivers creep a 
little off-topic, in my humble opinion, though I understand the 
utility.  Perhaps you might be interested in looking at boot.kernel.org.

- Shao Miller
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