netboot related projects
Hi, I just wanted to let you know that I contacted the maintainer of Etherboot to inform him of my current attempt to port the etherboot drivers to grub2. As I understand (don't hesitate to correct me or give more details if you know them), the development of etherboot will stop and future development will be done on a new project called gpxe. This will occur shortly when Etherboot will reach its version 5.5. gpxe will have more features such as memory allocation, availability for more platforms and so on. gpxe will also replace the development of nilo. The etherboot drivers will be used but I was told that the interface will change. -- Vincent Guffens ___ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
Re: netboot related projects
vincent guffens [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Hi Vincent, I just wanted to let you know that I contacted the maintainer of Etherboot to inform him of my current attempt to port the etherboot drivers to grub2. Is he willing to cooperate with us so it will be easier to share code? I think I once sent him an email about it... But I am not sure anymore. :-) -- Marco ___ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
Re: netboot related projects
On Saturday 29 April 2006 22:15, Marco Gerards wrote: vincent guffens [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Hi Vincent, I just wanted to let you know that I contacted the maintainer of Etherboot to inform him of my current attempt to port the etherboot drivers to grub2. Is he willing to cooperate with us so it will be easier to share code? I think I once sent him an email about it... But I am not sure anymore. :-) Honestly, I don't like to copy Etherboot's drivers to GRUB any longer. I rather consider how to use the UNDI interface provided by Etherboot. When I worked on netboot in GRUB Legacy, Etherboot didn't support UNDI, so I had to copy the drivers. According to him, the current Etherboot supports UNDI, so it should be feasible to use Etherboot's drivers via UNDI. I think the difficulty is the case where GRUB is not loaded by Etherboot, for example, when GRUB boots from a disk directly. In this case, one way would be to hack Etherboot so that Etherboot can be invoked by GRUB and give the control back to GRUB. From the experience of GRUB Legacy, I know how painful to synchronize code with an external project, so I'd like to investigate this direction. Okuji ___ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
Re: netboot related projects
Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote: On Saturday 29 April 2006 22:15, Marco Gerards wrote: vincent guffens [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Hi Vincent, I just wanted to let you know that I contacted the maintainer of Etherboot to inform him of my current attempt to port the etherboot drivers to grub2. Is he willing to cooperate with us so it will be easier to share code? I think I once sent him an email about it... But I am not sure anymore. :-) Honestly, I don't like to copy Etherboot's drivers to GRUB any longer. I rather consider how to use the UNDI interface provided by Etherboot. When I worked on netboot in GRUB Legacy, Etherboot didn't support UNDI, so I had to copy the drivers. According to him, the current Etherboot supports UNDI, so it should be feasible to use Etherboot's drivers via UNDI. I think the difficulty is the case where GRUB is not loaded by Etherboot, for example, when GRUB boots from a disk directly. In this case, one way would be to hack Etherboot so that Etherboot can be invoked by GRUB and give the control back to GRUB. From the experience of GRUB Legacy, I know how painful to synchronize code with an external project, so I'd like to investigate this direction. true, but this is why the idea here is to use the drivers without modification or at least with as few modifications as possible. The driver that I have working now (ns8390 to drive the qemu NE2000 emulation) works with no modification at all, it only requires the inclusion of a few lines of code before the driver code and at the end (i.e could be scripted in a general way). Further it does not put any constraint on the GRUB interface. I don't know much about UNDI but I checked that there is an UNDI driver in etherboot that could, I think, be included just as mentioned above. Of course, this require an additional glue layer which is not particularly elegant. Please, let me know what you think about this way of doing think as am I still spending some time of it in the hope that it could be usefull for grub2 (the latest version can be found at http://www.inma.ucl.ac.be/~guffens/grub2_netboot/ ). -- Vincent Guffens ___ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
Re: netboot related projects
On Sunday 30 April 2006 00:03, vincent guffens wrote: true, but this is why the idea here is to use the drivers without modification or at least with as few modifications as possible. GRUB Legacy did the same, and failed in keeping the code up-to-date. Because: - you still have to check all updated files every time. - you depend on the internal API of Etherboot, so you need to develop glue code again and again. I would say that this is not desirable, unless Etherboot developers make the internal API quite stable, and this is unlikely to happen. They have good reasons to change it from time to time. IMHO, the only feasible approach is to depend on only the external API of Etherboot. This is the UNDI interface. Fortunately, if we use UNDI, we can provide the same feature for PXE ROMs as well, and UNDI is a standard. So I prefer to develop a network device based on UNDI rather than copying Etherboot drivers. Okuji ___ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
