[Etherboot-developers] Etherboot 4.7.19 (development) released

[Ken Y. <ke...@nl...>]

I have released Etherboot 4.7.19 at http://etherboot.sourceforge.net

Changes in this release:

+ Pavel Tkatchouk verifies that lance.c can handle PCnet-FAST III
79c973. Added a new entry to lance.c and NIC. NIC entry not verified
yet.

+ Enhanced disnbi to decode ELF images too.

+ Arrgh! There are old BIOSes that rely on the wrong order of the bytes
in the device identifier in the PCIR and PnP structures. Wrote a Perl
program swapdevids.pl to swap these bytes. Apply this to image file just
before programming the EPROM.

+ Marty Connor suggested that the specs state that for PnP ROMs the
unsuccessful return from boot should be int 0x18 rather than int 0x19.
Using int 0x19, selecting L for local device doesn't work. Fixes needed
in both loader.S and start32.S (get lret to work properly, instead of
doing an int 0x19 directly, involved saving ss and sp in real mode
instead of in protected mode).

+ Wrote a Perl program disrom.pl to display key structures of a ROM
image.

+ Added call to binmode() in various Perl utilities so they should work
under other OSes.

+ Added check in makerom.c to warn if 55 AA not found at start of image.
It seems some people don't read the warning not to use the Linux
supplied as86.

+ It seems Z is a recent addition to pack/unpack formats in Perl and
even a Perl as recent as 5.004 doesn't implement it. Change Z5 in
mknbi.pl and TruncFD.pm to a5 since we only need to compare it against
'FAT12' and 'FAT16'.

+ Some errors found in osloader.c in the #ifdef IMAGE_MULTIBOOT
sections.  kernel should be KERNEL_BUF and union info should have
unsigned short s[256];. Also kernel -> KERNEL_BUF for IMAGE_FREEBSD,
obviously few FREEBSD users have tried compiling it.

+ Explain in docs that .com and .(lz)lilo images can be generated and
touch briefly on how to use them.

+ Donald Christensen contributed translations of floppyload.S and
loader.S to gas syntax. Currently they are in contrib/gassyntax/.  They
potentially allow us to throw away as86 and/or nasm and use GNU tools
throughout, but I have to do some work on them: 1. I have to check what
versions of gas accept the syntax, the 16-bit mode in gas was a recent
enhancement; 2. I have to put back the #ifdef PCI_PNP_HEADER into
loader.S and also bring it up to date to the recent patches.
floppyload.S should be usable as is.

MD5 sums:

b29e6b81cd86effdfabb25dc18198026  etherboot-4.7.19.tar.bz2
a2e5b5f6bcfd0edeaacc941e3f809c61  etherboot-4.7.19.tar.gz