Communication over network during Kernel Bootup

08-13-2009	#1 (permalink)
Rish Just Joined! Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: I can be found out in desert of Arizona or in Green fields of western India. Posts: 4	Communication over network during Kernel Bootup Hello All, I am facing a particular question regarding the Networking and TCP-IP modules in Linux system. In my current study work, i am trying to fetch some data into my local PC from a remote PC while the Kernel is booting. The remote PC is fully functional but local PC is just booting into the kernel. During this time, TCP-IP protocol is not available as i guess it is the part of OS and not the linux Kernel code. So in order to achieve this, I need some kind of barebone network driver which can communicate over the network even when the TCP-IP is not initialized. Is it possible at the first place? Is anything like this available in existing linux kernel or some other open source development? Please help me out. Thanks in advance.

08-17-2009	#2 (permalink)
Rubberman Linux Guru Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: I can be found either 40 miles west of Chicago, or in a galaxy far, far away. Posts: 3,779	Basic TCP/IP code is in the current kernel code, but drivers for your network hardware might not be enabled or loaded. Please be more specific as to what *exactly* you are trying to do. Why do you need to do this before the kernel is loaded? You can do this at init time after the kernel is loaded and shut down the system if something required from the remote system is not available, or some security protocol you are using is violated. __________________ Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real time.

08-17-2009

#3 (permalink)

Rish

Just Joined!

Join Date: Aug 2009

Location: I can be found out in desert of Arizona or in Green fields of western India.

Posts: 4

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rubberman

Basic TCP/IP code is in the current kernel code, but drivers for your network hardware might not be enabled or loaded. Please be more specific as to what exactly you are trying to do. Why do you need to do this before the kernel is loaded? You can do this at init time after the kernel is loaded and shut down the system if something required from the remote system is not available, or some security protocol you are using is violated.

I would like to rephrase my problem again .

Two PCs host-1 and host-2 are connected in a LAN. Host-2 has already booted and running the OS, where as host-1 has just started to boot. While booting the kernel (and at this moment i guess, TCP-IP protocol hasn't been initialized as it is a part of OS rather than kernel) in host-1, the host-1 connects with host-2 in order to fetch some configuration settings of host-2. Now my problem here is that as the TCP-IP protocol is not available at this moment in the kernel, which protocol (if any) or driver should I use to connect my host-1 and host-2 over the network while host-1 is just booting.... Both host-1 and host-2 have linux. So do we have any network protocol which is the part of linux kernel?

I actually tried to put the TCP-IP client code in kernel at various places but at every place, socket is being created but at the time of Connect, it's giving error 101 which means the network is not reachable. Can u point out the problem with this approach?