Re: Fwd: Re: [Etherboot-developers] Tested UNDI driver....

[Michael B. <mb...@fe...>]

On Sat, 29 Nov 2003, Paolo Salvan wrote:
> At the moment I'll use the workaround of including the via-rhine driver
> (and others also...) in the .zpxe image...  ("make
> bin/undi--via-rhine.zpxe"): it doesn't work cleanly, but it works... it
> does:
> - try to use the via-rhine.....failed, because UNDI is in memory
> - try to use UNDI.....failed, because UNDI is in memory
> - retry to use the via-rhine.....this time everything is ok, because
> UNDI has been unloaded by the previous attempt ;o)
> I'm preparing an image that I hope will work on the majority of PXE
> systems with the following command:
> make bin/undi--via-rhine--eepro100--rtl8139--3c90x.zpxe
> (ie: I'm including in the .zpxe image the most common PXE cards...)
> Do you think there are some other common PCI card often used with PXE
> rom? I have space for about other 4-5 drivers before overflowing the
> 32kb limit...

Those are the only ones I've come across so far.

> Do you think this approach will increase loader reliability or can it
> have some drawback?

It has the drawback of being ugly and generating lots of failure messages 
during bootup (due to the two attempts that fail).

If you don't set PXELOADER_KEEP_ALL then PXE will be out of the way by the 
time the via-rhine driver tries for the first time.  This would be neater 
(but wouldn't work when using a PXE-from-floppy approach).

> Other questions:
> Does BIOS allocate memory from A0000 downto 00000?

Yes; A0000 is 640k.

> Moving the base address of NBI from 90000 to 80000 can have some
> drawbacks?

Not that I'm aware of.

Michael