Re: [Etherboot-developers] Q: Multiple drivers.

[<ke...@us...>]

>Anyway, REQUIRE_VCI_ETHERBOOT makes you ignore the ISP, no?

It's wrong to require a special option to handle a common situation.
See below.

>Using the nic the bios lives might be a tie-breaker when you have a
>choice, but I don't think it is "obviously" right; in fact I think it's

It's not that it's obviously right to use the same NIC, it's obviously
wrong to boot another NIC from this ROM. If I move the NIC with the ROM
to another machine I may get a different boot behaviour. No good.

>evil to vary the behaviour of Etherboot depending on whether you
>happened to boot from a nic rom, bios rom, via PXE, lilo, etc. As Vasil

No, if I put the ROM on this NIC, I meant to boot this NIC, not another.
This is one situation where I have indicated my intent. If I boot from
floppy or BIOS ROM, my intent has not been fully indicated and some
other behaviour is plausible. If your intent is for the flash memory on
the NIC to be a general purpose BIOS extension area, fine, but you
should have to select that compile option.

>> options. I could then put a single driver ROM on my internal NIC, and
>> you can put a multiple driver multiple request ROM in your BIOS.
>
>Absolutely. :) There's a great deal of scope for people to experiment
>with new ways of using this kind of thing. Another of Etherboot's wins
>for me is that it seems eminently extendable. with functionality just
>like this.

Glad we agree. I look forward to your code. :-)