Re: [Etherboot-developers] Re: Via-rhine in etherboot 5.1.1 & misc

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

>Valid also, but what is the need for a ring in this case ? If you wait
>for the transmit to be finished each time you send a packet, then a
>single
>buffer is enough.
>With my proposed patch, you can have 2 packets waiting to be sent, and
>only
>have to wait if you want to send a third one... Am I wrong ?

The ring is a leftover from the Linux driver that whoever ported the
code left in there. There is in fact no advantage in having more than
one transmit buffer and a memory penalty for doing so because all the
protocols used by Etherboot are stop and wait protocols. Network loading
is fast enough as it is anyway.

>Does not break the specs : the specs remains valid, but you get an extra
>feature
>for Etherboot... ;-)
>Well, I can live with my own version for now, it was just an idea.

Yes it does. It means Etherboot is accepting something outside the specs
and that means people may come to rely on it, and then it has to stay.
That's how crud starts. In any case PXE does not guarantee that you can
load more than 32kB of image starting at 0x7c00 and I'm surprised you
can load a kernel. Maybe it's not a kernel you're loading then.