Diskless booting of Amiga

[freqmax]

Is it possible to network boot an Amiga without any disk system whatsoever? (no floppy, hdd etc) Especially is there any code in Kickstart to support this?

Some systems just can't be without their boot blocks.

Like PXE on PCs.

[kickstart]

no

[Mrs Beanbag]

maybe a custom ROM could be made. that could be interesting actually. You could boot from the network if you could do that.

[freqmax]

Kind of reminds me of harddisk controllers. They often have a boot-ROM. Perhaps pre-loading filesystem via a ROM driver is the only way to do it?

Guess that would be:
CPU loads cold boot vector
Kickstart runs
Kickstart jumps to expansion ROM that set jump table to filesystem driver
Kickstart resumes to boot fully
User see boot screen
?

[delshay]

Someone is looking if its possible to boot direct from the A1200 PCMCIA slot via custom roms.

Being able to boot direct into OS3.1 without a hardrive/floppy would be interesting if possible.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Someone who was developing the AROS 68k ROM (I forget who) once told me he accidentally made the RAM: disk bootable once and it booted it. You can also boot from RAD disk (I tried this once, I effectively net booted using a boot floppy to pull an image of my workbench partition off the network and unpack it into RAD). So yes it is possible with only small changes, since a device doesn't need to correspond to a physical drive to be bootable.

All you need is a bootable disk with LoadWB on it to get a basic workbench, which is only a few kb. I suggested the idea of a ROM disk once. It would be interesting to be able to go straight to workbench from the boot menu, and could be very useful. Especially if there were room in ROM for such things as AmiTCP.

[polyp2000]

in case you didnt see this yesterday ...

http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=102

maybe there is some scope for this ?

[Matt_H]

The old EB920 cards had network boot ROM sockets, but I don't think the chips were ever developed.

Now that FlashROMs are fairly common, I imagine one could conceivably develop a mini TCP/IP stack and associated pieces that would mount a NW0: device in time to be selected from Early Startup Control. Would probably require reflashing every time you wanted to change the parameters of NW0:, though.

@ delshay

The 1200 can be booted from PCMCIA with standard ROMs - it's the CC0: device. The only catch is that the actual media has to be one of the 4MB or smaller SRAM cards. Yes, booting CompactFlash or such attached to PCMCIA would require reworked ROMs. If compactflash.device were ROMable, I think that would just about handle it if the CF media was set up as an Amiga RDB disk instead of fat95 via a mountlist.

[Mrs Beanbag]

there is also this:
http://eab.abime.net/hardware-mods/66815-custom-flashrom-design-amigas.html

[freqmax]

Ok so the recpipe is an extension (EEP)ROM that contains hardware driver, UDP/IP stack, NFS driver.

So does existing hardware drivers, UDP/IP, NFS etc support being ROM:ed ?

Found this ROM collection that perhaps can be used for decompilation:
http://amigaromarchives.limewebs.com/

[Thomas]

It would probably be easier to create a ROMable RAD driver which mounts a ROMed disk image (ADF).

In order to access files via NFS you need DOS sooner or later. At the time when ROM modules are activated, DOS is not yet active. So it's better to let the ROM module add a BootNode to the system and let DOS boot from the RAD disk.

The other advantage is that you can use existing software for TCP/IP, SANA-II and NFS and don't need to care whether they are ROMable or not. You only need to make one new ROMable module.

[freqmax]

Catch, I like a clean solution without extra drives clogging up the memory
Ie a computer environment with only NET: not RAD: + NET:

Exec from kickstart v1.2 hints about expansion ROM at 0xF0 0000:
http://wandel.ca/homepage/execdis/exec_disassembly.txt

Perhaps useful:
http://wiki.amigaos.net/index.php/Expansion_Library#The_Expansion_Sequence

Amiga device driver guide:
http://wandel.ca/homepage/execdis/devices_doc.txt

RAM drive disassembly:
http://wandel.ca/homepage/execdis/ramdrive_disassembly.txt

Anyone found source code for a ROM:able driver?

[Mrs Beanbag]

ROM: drive wouldn't need to take up memory, you could essentially have a RAM-like, read only drive pre-populated in the ROM, mount that and boot from it. So you could put anything you wanted in there.

[Dr.Bongo]

Guess I'm missing something? but why would you want to?

[Zac67]

The Deneb USB controller (A3k or 4k only, of course) can be used to load all required system software disklessly. For writable storage you could just add a USB stick. You could also use it to load any network drivers and continue booting from a share.

In theory, Kickstart supports any imaginable boot method through a suitable boot ROM - just like any bootable SCSI card.