[syslinux] Re: Q: passing DHCP options to the booted linux-kernel?

[H. Peter Anvin]

Ph. Marek wrote:
>>>What I didn't find was how to specify the interface these settings apply
>>>- If a machine has several network cards, the one booted from may not be
>>>eth0, and AFAIK the kernel uses the parameter on eth0.
>>>
>>>But maybe there's a trick I've missed up to now. Possibly giving the PCI
>>>id (or even better, PCI location) to the kernel to specify the interface?
>>
>>What I might be able to do is to add an option to pass the hardware
>>address to the kernel, which would specify the interface.  The PCI ID
>>isn't readily available; heck, it might not *exist*.
> 
> That would be perfect, especially, if the kernel understood this value too :-)

Why should the kernel care about it?

> Thanks a lot, I'll be hoping for that.
> If you've got a patch for something around 2.4.20 I'm ready to test. (I'll 
> need a newer pxelinux too, I suppose).

The ipconfig/nfsroot stuff in the kernel is going away for 2.5, so I'm 
not particularly interested in hacking on it since it's a dead end 
anyway.  It's all moving to userspace in 2.5, and you can do it in 
userspace in 2.4 as well by using an initrd and pivot_root.

	-hpa