On Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 01:44:03PM +0200, Eli Cohen wrote: > Hello, I am replying only because noone else did yet, although I am probably not the right person to do so.
> first I appologize if this is not the right place to post this question. > My question is concerned with using grub to do boot of a diskless > machine over the network. > I have recently posted to Etherboot a network driver for Mellanox > Technologies HCA devices, implementing IP Over Infiniband, and I would > like to know how to integrate it into the recent release of Grub, i.e. > 0.97. If you intend to ask "How to integrate it so that it works", e.g. because you want to use it, then I have no idea - but hopefully looking at the sources and documentation should be enough. If you want to ask how to get it integrated into the next official version, then I am afraid I think it won't. grub legacy is in maintenance mode, and no new features are accepted. You can of course post a patch, and people who need it will use it. Feng Shuo used to do this, as can be seen here: <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=9408> You are welcome to continue the tradition - I used to be a user of these patches in the past, and I guess there are people that would still want them. Of course, it could be argued that a better investment of your time will be working on the networking support of grub2. > Another thing that I do not quite understand is why should Ehterboot > drivers need to intergrate into grub anyway? After all, the network > driver is already in memory since it was used to fetch nbgrub or pxegrub > images from the network and I would expect grub to use it (the same > pxelinux.0 for example does it). The simple answer - because grub can also boot from disk, without having PXE/etherboot load it. You can compile grub with network support, plus your favourite nics' drivers, install it on e.g. a floppy, and netboot. Of course you can also put etherboot on such a floppy and have it netboot nbgrub (or pxegrub), but still there are reasons why you might want to boot grub and not etherboot from such a floppy, so having the ability is not useless. There is a driver, also mentioned in the above link, to make it use UNDI. Last time I tried, it partially worked for me, but I do not remember details anymore. I do remember it had some problems preventing me from putting it into production. -- Didi _______________________________________________ Bug-grub mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-grub
