On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, ollie wrote: > Are you using SiS900 driver in etherboot ?? In 5.0.5 and later, the > driver turns on BMDMA it self. >
yes, etherboot does turn on some BMDMA for some interfaces. Here is a fun problem we had. Etherboot was not turning on BMDMA on the eepro100 we had on the smartcore-p5. And yet etherboot had an eepro100 driver. It turned out that the device id on the smartpro eepro100 is slightly different than the one in etherboot, so we had to update the etherboot driver. Looking at the eepro100 driver in etherboot reveals an aging 2.2-era driver. If there are bug updates in later Linux kernels for eepro100, they probably won't make it easily into the old eepro100 driver in Etherboot. This type of problem is the reason I am not so convinced we want elfBIOS. I don't see how elfBIOS or etherboot or whatever will ever keep up with what the kernel does. One last example. With our bproc primary boot in FLASH, we can boot over myrinet. Anybody volunteer to take on the task of putting myrinet into etherboot? Not me, for sure. I'm not up for that challenge. But, I'm willing to be convinced with working code :-) ron
