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

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

>> It's wrong to require a special option to handle a common situation.
>> See below.
>
>Hmm. I don't regard REQUIRE_VCI_ETHERBOOT as a "special" option, I must

It's a special option because it requires server side handling and
will not work with a generic DHCP setup.

>> 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.
>
>Why not? It's now a different *machine* after all - seems likely that

But it's the same NIC with the same ROM. In one machine it boots using
itself. I move it to another machine that has a second NIC of the same
model and it tries to boot the other NIC. Huh? This is predictable
behaviour, whether it manages to boot depends on whether the second NIC
is plugged in or not?

>Let's not lose sight of the fact that I want to boot a machine: the nic
>offers a network medium, a unique ID and possibly some flash rom. nics
>are fairly mobile anonymous entities in our development servers, so I
>definitely favour predictability of behaviour over any idea that
>particular nic is specially honoured.

Therein lies the difference between our POVs. You treat the EEPROM on
the NIC as extra BIOS storage. You probably don't have any EPROMs.

>these systems have multiple NICs and I assure you that at no time did I
>ever consider changing the boot medium for administrative convenience to
>be a partial or full statement of intent of which nic to use. I just
>appreciated the fact that Etherboot always worked in the same way.

No problem, just don't define BOOT_HOST_NIC_ONLY in the config. I never
proposed that this behaviour be imposed on everybody or all setups. If
you boot off a floppy or the BIOS, there is no HOST_NIC so all
interfaces are equal.  The code should detect that you are not booting
off the NIC's ROM anyway.  By default you will get the behaviour you
want, BOOT_HOST_NIC_ONLY actually requires more work to identify the
host NIC and may not be possible with all hardware.