I'm using an old kernel, 2.6.32, and I would like to boot the kernel over TFTP and mount the filesystem over NFS. Mounting the kernel over TFTP is a plus, but mounting the filesystem over NFS is a must.I would like to drop the ethernet connection on the board, being forced to use the USB for this.How can I understand what USB to Ethernet adapters are suitable for this kernel, if any?Thank you.
How do I understand if an USB Ethernet adapter is compatible with a certain kernel version to use it to load kernel/filesystem?
boot;linux kernel;drivers;usb;ethernet
In general linux has very good support for network devices. If the device will work with your version of linux it will allow setup of nfs root with the appropriate initrd. so the problem with root over nfs is that you have to make an initrd that will accommodate it. NFS root without initrd may still work, but will not work with usb ethernet adapters as they are all hotplugged. Initrd modification is not for the faint of heart.Loading the kernel and initrd over the network link is another order of difficulty. Firstly until the kernel takes over it does not matter if linux supports the device, only boot loader support matters at this point. The two bootloaders which may at some point do what you want are grub and ipxe. (there are other network bootloaders, but as far as I know none support usb.) ipxe usb support has not made it into the main development branch yet. grub has recently released support for usb keyboards and disk drives at the same time. usb networking has not been publicly discussed as a possibility yet. the only remaining option is a kexec, but that is done from a running linux. In all such cases there is still the question of which device would you load the bootloader from as I have not yet found any system roms that would allow booting from a usb network adapter. 