booting linux on Diskless devices

Hi,

I have a MIPS based developement board. It does not have any storage media such as hard disk or compact flash etc. i have compiled and loaded the linux kernel on to it . but when it boots up it shows me the following error:

NET: Registered protocol family 2
IP: routing cache hash table of 2048 buckets, 16Kbytes
TCP established hash table entries: 16384 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)
TCP bind hash table entries: 16384 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)
TCP: Hash tables configured (established 16384 bind 16384)
NET: Registered protocol family 1
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(1,0).

i searched in the google regarding this and found that most of the solutions involve specifying the had disk (root=/dev/hda1) in the standard bootloader(GRUB,LILO etc). but in my board i dont have anything like that and i have a bootloader called YAMON.so i cant specify the root parameter in it . I also read in from the net that we can mount the root filesystem either by using initial ram disk or over the network by using NFS . if any one has any docs or links related to this can you send me that.

Also can anyone say me how to boot the linux from devices which dont have a hard disk ?

if this query does not concern with this forum i apologize for that.

thanks in advance,

Leo,

That looks tricky to me because I haven't ever used any diskless machines except very old DEC servers which don't run linux and boot via MOP. So I can't really help you. But anyway I would try to seach for something about your boot loader, how to configure it to mount root via NFS or MFS. I see that TCP/IP stack is loaded so it must be possible to mount root via NFS, you just need to figure out how to specify it in it's config.



Лебедев Алексей