Re: [Etherboot-developers] mknbi-1.2-7rc2 released

[Doug A. <amb...@am...>]

Ken Yap writes:
| >Sorry to say this again, but I prefer using GRUB together with
| >`etherboot', and so nobody has to deal with `mknbi' in connection
| >with UNIX systems (for DOS mknbi is already needed so far).
| 
| There's no accounting for taste. :-)
| 
| GRUB suffers from the problem that it uses another copy of the network
| driver so you have to decide ahead of time which hardware you want to
| support when building GRUB. Ideally secondary loaders should be able to
| use the boot ROMs network driver. Hmm, sounds very much like PXE. I wish
| I had the time to rework Etherboot's architecture to allow callbacks so
| that secondary loaders can do network operations. Not necessarily PXE
| style, just having callbacks would be nice.

Heh, you just got patches to do some of that in the context of the
PXE patches to emulate PXE enough for the FreeBSD PXE boot loader to
work!  Maybe grub could be re-worked to access the hardware via PXE and
not just look like a PXE image.  Randoms thoughts are what if
Etherboot had a PXE network driver writen in terms the PXE stuff
that was sent in?  That would seem to get us most of the way there.
"pxegrub" could use the Etherboot "PXE network driver" to talk
to the Etherboot PXE emulation layer.

This sounds interesting to me.

Doug A.