Other software

BProc is a key piece of cluster infrastructure but it does not address issues of booting or setting up nodes in a cluster. The beoboot performs these functions. Beoboot must be built for a specific version of BProc since it links against BProc slave daemon.

In order for Beoboot to be able to do its stuff it requires a number of other small system modifications. Most notably, it requires a modified dynamic linker (which is part of the GNU C library package) in order for bpsh with nodes that have no libraries installed. The patch adds a bit of code to the dynamic linker which will cause it to try the BProc file request interface if it fails to open a shared library.

A patch is also provided for the modutils package. This patch adds a --node argument to insmod and modprobe. This allows insmod and modprobe to install a module on a node even if the module isn't present on the node's file system. This is used by beoboot at boot time to install things like disk drivers on slave nodes with no writable file system space.