Re: [Etherboot-developers] Scanning the PCI bus

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

>> The issue of what to do with multiple NICs needs more thinking. The code
>> in config.c is not flexible enough.
>
>Attempts to find the one true nic are ultimately doomed to failure -
>one could use the first nic scanned which Etherboot can support, but
>this wouldn't reliably match Linux's eth0 where multiple nic types are
>present (Linux orders nics from the lowest to highest slot number of
>nics which a driver recognises, but the order of driver installation
>is essentially arbitrary). If this isn't what you need, then at build
>time one might choose...

There are lots of polciies one can adopt, including trying all
interfaces. The current point is the current adhoc decision should be
taken out of pci.c, pci.c should just enumerate the NICs and the pplicy
can be implemented somewhere else. Eric's patches are a first step. If
somebody wants to develop an architecture that allows flexible policies,
I'd look upon that favaourably. As usual, submissions of working code
get a head start.