[Beowulf] Diskless booting help:

[Mark Hahn]

> As you said I don't need tftpd. But I want the root filessytem alone to be
> mounted over the network, since my CD-ROM does not contains that. May it  be
> dump looking. But, is it possible?

sure it's possible, but again, why do you have tftp?  the root FS 
will be mounted by NFS, so what will be fetched via tftp?

>> ip=dhcp root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=10.50.5.5:/newclu/,rsize=4096,v3,nolock \
>> rootfstype=ext2 BOOT_IMAGE=bzImage-2.6.22.2 \
>> ip=10.50.4.1:10.50.5.5:10.50.63.254:255.255.192.0
>
> My kernel arguements as follows,
>
> append initrd=images/centos/5.0/initrd.img ramdisk_size=100000 ksdevice=eth0
> ip=dhcp --url http://192.168.128.41/images/centos/5.0/

the --url part looks like something you may have pasted from a 
kickstart or yum config - I don't believe the kernel will properly 
interpret that.  I think you need the nfsroot specification instead.

> I am not passing any arguments to kernel regarding the root filesystem.
> right? I want the root filesystem alone to be mounted over the tftpd.

I don't think so.  tftp is not a filesystem, but a very primitive
and slow mechanism for copying files.  _if_ you wanted to tftp your 
rootfs, the only sensible way I can imagine would be to actually 
put the whole rootfs (_agressively_ pruned!) into your initrd,
and simply continue to use that when running.  besides the slowness
of tftp, this would also imply that the whole disk image stay in memory,
which is probably not what you'd ever want!

in short, I think you should export the desired root via nfs,
and configure the clients to use it.