smbfs as root fs

[Urban Widmark]

On Mon, 25 Sep 2000, Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> I'm currently trying to write a test installer that is capable of
> extracting the linux distribution (one .tar.gz) to a client computer.
> However, I want this .tar.gz (and libc as well as tar and gzip etc.)
> to be exported from a samba _or_ NT server...

Do you really need to mount a smbfs root for that? A "rescue" disk thing
with smbfs support (or smbclient) would be able to download the tar.gz and
unpack it to a newly formatted partition.


> So has anybody hacked the kernel to accept a smbfs-root filesystem?

Not that I know of.


> Otherwiese I'd have to hack it in myself;)

If your goal is to have a kernel image capable of mounting smbfs as a root
fs then you probably need to look at fs/nfs/nfsroot.c. Putting smbmount
into the kernel is possible, 2.0.x does that, so there should be code to
borrow from there.

You could also boot using initrd, making it possible to have the normal
smbmount/smbmnt program do the mounting.

Then there is the problem with smbfs not actually implementing everything
a normal unix fs does (symlinks, device files (possibly avoidable using
devfs), does swap over smbfs work?, and probably a bunch of other things).

/Urban