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

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

>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.

At first glance I don't think it can be modified to do pxelinux. The
FreeBSD patches just do "PXE-style" booting, which means a small
secondary loader is loaded starting at 0x7c00 and this loads the main
image. There is no requirement for it to go through the "official" PXE
interrupts, in fact this one just does a longjmp to the Etherboot
routines. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it means you can't
take pxelinux and use that. So either:

1. Develop an analogous stub to what FreeBSD is using, but for Linux.
But is that much improvement than doing mknbi on the image?

2. Do the full PXE interrupt thing in Etherboot. This would allow
Etherboot to use pxelinux, bpbatch and other PXE utils. But I think the
PXE spec is ugly.

3. A crazy idea I tossed around for a while, a tftpd that does a mknbi
on the fly.

4. What Eric is doing: Fix the kernel build process, so that netbootable
and diskbootable images are generated directly.

I like 4, but it doesn't do anything for other OSes. But then I don't
have other OSes, save FreeDOS, hence my inaction.