booting/installing Solaris over HTTP

[robinsmidsrod]

sab: Generally you'll have one kernel and possibly multiple initrd commands in that script, together with some extra options after the kernel command which instructs the Solaris kernel+ramdisk what exactly to do during boot. On Linux, these parameters are available in /proc/cmdline after the kernel has loaded. I'm not sure where you can locate them on Solaris.

I've heard of pxegrub being used on Solaris for netboot, and you should try to dig into how that configuration works, find out what kernel parameters are used/available, and use those in iPXE as required. If the Solaris ramdisk is required to load additional files off local storage, then you'll need to instruct it where to load said files. If the ramdisk has not been designed for it, it could be very hard. But considering they have pxegrub I'm sure they have _something_ (though it might be NFS only).

My usual flow when dealing with this is to unpack the ramdisk and look at how it steps through the system initialization (unless there are good docs available) and see if there are extension points I can make use of with kernel parameters. On Linux /sbin/init is the first process that is started, and its config is usually /etc/inittab. I'm not sure how Solaris does it, but I'm sure you'll be able to find docs on how the Solaris kernel behaves somewhere.

Also be aware that when booting Linux you can use the second parameter to initrd (iPXE command) to wrap a normal file as a cpio archive and inject it into the ramdisk. This is very useful to add additional files to the ramdisk without having to recompile it, and those files can very well help you to modify behavior during boot. What I'm not sure about, is if this feature works with Solaris boot_archive-style ramdisks. Someone else might be able to confirm/deny that.

Hope this gives you some ideas on where to go next.