[Beowulf] reboot without passing through BIOS?

[David Mathog]

David Lombard wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 09:13:56AM -0700, David Mathog wrote:
> > It then occurred to me that doing so would
> > require a trip through the BIOS on every reboot, at least on every x86
> > based computer I'm familiar with.
> 
> Not since kexec was added to the kernel!

That's exactly what I was thinking of for the Beowulf node problem.
For instance:

  http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27192

> Beyond using kexec as described above, grub directly supports this; lilo
> did too.

I know how to do this by changing the configurations, but not how to
specify a one time change that doesn't need to be manually undone later.
Is either of these boot loaders capable of doing the logical equivalent of:

  grub-next-boot-only -default 3

(Override whatever default is in the config file, but just for the next
boot.)

Thanks,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech