Specifying root mount options on diskless boot.

[Daniel Feenberg]

Daniel Braniss writes...

> I have it pxebooting nicely and running with an NFS root
> but it then reports locking problems: devd, syslogd, moused (and maybe
> others) lock their PID file to protect against multiple instances.
> Unfortunately, these daemons all start before statd/lockd and so the
> locking fails and reports "operation not supported".

Are you mounting /var via nfs?  We have been running FreeBSD 
diskless for several years, and have never run into this problem - but we 
use a memory filesystem. The memory filesystem can be quite small. Our 
methods are documented at

   http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/FreeBSD-diskless.html

If that isn't the problem, can you guess what we are doing differently to 
avoid it?

I note that the response to your message from "danny" offers the ability 
to pass arguments to the nfs mount command, but also seems to offer a fix 
for the fact that "classes" are not supported under PXE:

    http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/90368

I hope "danny" will offer a patch to mainline code - it would be an 
important improvement (and already promised in the documentation).

(I am sorry if this doesn't thread properly - I just joined the list after 
seeing the message). The thread is available at:

    http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2011-January/060854.html

Daniel Feenberg