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

[<ebi...@ln...>]

ke...@us... (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.


My take on the hardware support issue is a little different.  For
the most part I just want to load kernels instead of reinventing
hardware abstraction layers.  And kernels also have the issue of needing
hardware drivers.  

The only downside to having all of your drivers built in (disregarding devices
that cannot be reliably probed for) is that you need to have enough
memory to support them.   Currently for linux this is about 10MB.
Which is a substanial system requirement.  When I looked at the growth
it feels linear with time (though exponential with kernel major
revision).   So in my long term plan is to label a kernel with where
all of it's drivers are and to have a bootloader that can
decide not to load the unnecessary drivers in a generic kernel image.
For small machines at least that could be really beneficial.

Beyond that I intend to get booting linux from linux into the
mainstream kernel so something like GRUB (if you want it).  Can be
written as a user space application.

Eric