Hi Wolfgang,
A a few more specific answers to your questions
On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 10:44 PM, Chris Packham judge.packham@gmail.comwrote:
On 01/18/2013 11:44 PM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
Dear Chris,
Last time I checked (about 2 years ago) there was no officially agreed-on standard for example how network booting should be done in IPv6.
There used to be a document how TFTP could handle IPv6 addresses at
http://datatracker.ietf.org/idtracker/draft-evans-tftp-address-options/comme...
but this apears to be gone now. The proposal was rejected by then, and the comments ("I do recommend the transition to a better transport protocol.") sounded as if the IETF would like to abandon TFTp under IPv6.
For TFTP it's just a matter of which addresses the server binds to, and whether the CLI accepts IPv6 addresses. I think we had a patch for tftp-hpa floating around which was only a few lines. I'm not sure it's even needed these days.
As long as the bind is done with AF_UNSPEC then it will listen to either v4 or v6. You can explicitly force v4 or v6 by using AF_INET or AF_INET6. A modern version of tftp-hpa supports both AF_UNSPEC and AF_INET6. The IPv6 stack shouldn't care what application is being run over it. It's just udp as far as the stack is concerned.
I found links for DHCPv6, for example http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-dhcpv6-opt-netboot-00 but no read standard for a bootstrap protocol. Some documents indicated it might be based on iSCSI - but that would be quite complex; see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4173 http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/72/slides/dhc-12.pdf
DHCPv6 has come along way. At least in terms of address assignment and interop with other IPv6 auto-configuration mechanisms. I'm not sure about the bootstrap side of things though.
RFC5970[1] details network boot options for DHCPv6 (I think it's the ratified version of the draft you linked to). Basically this allows the server to specify a URL for the boot file which presumably could be something like tftp://[2001:db8::1]/uImage. Looks like the standard also covers passing kernel parameters and dealing with different architectures.
I'm not sure which, if any, dhcp6 server implementations support this RFC but it looks like the standards exist.
Thanks, Chris -- [1] - http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5970