Eric Van Hensbergen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > No reason in particular - it was intended to be a "quick hack" - our evaluation > > platform has neither keyboard, nor monitor, nor serial port..so we just needed > something easier than snooping memory with an American Arium ICE (which wasn't > very tractable for multiple systems). In principal you could hardcode the > destination, or include it in the DHCP. That would allow you to use broadcast, > multi-cast or point-to-point. In practice though, the amount of network traffic > generated by the console is truly trivial.
For something that must work when things are blowing up, I'm not overly fond of not hardcoding the address.. But the source is there so it might come down to whoever implements the best version :) Having a network console when you don't have serial or a monitor makes a lot of sense. And it seems to be the current driving factor behind network consoles. I'd just like to make it general enough that every one can have it enabled. Traffic wise I don't worry about 1 machine booting up so much as having 1000 machines on a subnet booting up at nearly the same time. After a certain point broadcast traffic on a network is just evil. And if you can avoid it so much the better. > I'll make sure I clean up the raw-ethernet console stuff in LinuxBIOS...right > now its bundled in with the embedded etherboot code. Thinking more on it, it > might also be usefull to put this stuff in the Etherboot package in general, > although using the embedded LinuxBIOS etherboot code allows some hacks to get > console before you actually start the etherboot process (fundamentally you can > start it up as soon as memory and PCI initialize). Thanks that will be appreciated. Eric
