[illumos-Developer] Net booting illumos?

[Bryan Cantrill]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 7:54 AM, Bryan Cantrill <bryancantrill at gmail.com> wrote:
> Has anyone been able to get illumos to net boot?  We're seeing a hang
> on boot (after/while plumbing the dld streams module), and it would be
> very helpful to know if someone has gotten this to work (or is trying
> to, for that matter)...

Just to follow up on this:  as it turns out, this is an odd bug due to
a circular dependency between the kcf and swrand drivers.  When we
boot over the network (or more accurately, from a ramdisk that has
itself been loaded by pxegrub or gPXE), we load kcf as one of dev/ip's
dependencies; kcf's _init, in turn, calls kcf_rnd_schedule_timeout(),
which calls crypto_mech2id_common(), which does an explicit modload()
of "crypto/swrand".  The problem is that crypto/swrand has a
dependency on kcf -- which is busy (recall that we got here by trying
to load it), and this code path doesn't detect circular dependencies.
When one does not boot over the network, we load zfs before kcf or
swrand -- and zfs has an explicit dependency on swrand which then
pulls in kcf.  Of course, this code path still calls
crypto_mech2id_common(), but because this loads a module by name, it
detects the circular dependency and kicks out.  This bug should be
fixed (there are several ways to fix it), but we worked around it by
adding a "forceload: crypto/swrand" directive to /etc/system.

        - Bryan