[Etherboot-developers] Etherboot 5.0.6 (production) released

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

I have released Etherboot 5.0.6 (production) at
http://etherboot.sourceforge.net/

The most important changes in this release are a major rework of the PCI
subsystem by Eric Biederman and the first gigabit NIC driver (Intel
E1000) for Etherboot by Christopher Li. And as always, thanks are due to
Marty Connor for his indefatigable efforts at popularising Etherboot
through http://rom-o-matic.net/

I'm sure Murphy's Law ensures that a bug report will be submitted within
5 minutes of this announcement :-), but one must move forwards.  The
steps towards operation with LinuxBIOS and booting kernel images
directly are exciting.

MD5 sums:

bf1896c3162bd07346977f2c34684244  etherboot-5.0.6.tar.bz2
a54484c54523d0342cc2a0330ff10aec  etherboot-5.0.6.tar.gz

SHA1 sums:

1b0dfc3238be9329816a0124c432ba2e5909bc00  etherboot-5.0.6.tar.bz2
da0c2cb59d9b2dc68c72c5f6d49757faec725b20  etherboot-5.0.6.tar.gz

Changes from 5.0.5:

+ Changes to enable fa311too driver which were overlooked in 5.0.5.

+ Chien-Yu Chen sent in patches to support the SiS630ET. Independently,
Doug Ambrisko made the same changes. Marty Connor tidied the patches.

+ In misc.c, when enabling/disabling Gate A20, call int 0x15 with
ax=0x240x to do handling first, and if that is not supported, fall back
to using the keyboard controller. Hopefully this will solve Gate A20
problems for recent BIOSes.

+ Add missing entry to config.c for the Macronix 98713 (device ID
0x512). But latest report is that it doesn't transmit. Anybody wanna
debug?

+ Omit test for pointer to $PnP string for ISA NIC images, it may
trigger false recognition of a PnP ROM. Just use legacy mode.

+ Merged in Christopher Li's Intel E1000 gigabit Ethernet driver.

+ RISKO Gergely found that the ADMTek Comet 983 works with the tulip
driver if you provide the right PCI IDs.

+ Rohit Jalan contributed patches to support FreeBSD booting via PXE.
(genrules.pl needed hacking to make it ignore the system includes in
osdep.h.)  Anybody want to see if it can be made to support pxelinux?
[Glanced at it and I think general PXE support may be hard, you may need
an Etherboot specific secondary loader. - Ken]

+ Merged in Eric Biederman's patches to allow trying all PCI devices.

+ From Eric Biederman: A small patch to allow the serial port parameters
to be unchanged at activation.  Major changes to start32.S to merge
LinuxBIOS support.  New files for LinuxBIOS support.  PCBIOS specific
functions split out into pcbios.S. Massive clean up of PCI subsystem
logic.

+ Jean-Jacques Michel sent in a fix for via-rhine.c to make sure the
transmit is finished before returning from the _transmit routine.
Also found a bug in gcc 3.0.3 that affected rtl8139.c. Moving the
assignment to nstype in _transmit two lines up avoids it.

+ Based on the experience of Yedidyah Bar-David, in eepro100.c,
increased udelay around line 533 after getting MAC address to
udelay(10000).

+ Added PCI IDs for RTL8129, which can use the rtl8139 driver.

+ Added PCI IDs for 3Com905 with device ID 0x9058. Confirmed working by
Fabio Papa.

+ Added PCI IDs for D-Link 528, which is a PCI NE2000 clone.

+ Philip R. Auld found a block number rollover bug due to promotion to
signed in main.c.

+ Luigi Rizzo sent in a patch to nfs.c to implement an adaptive timeout. 

+ New config files for floppyfw-1.9.19 in contrib/mkffwnb/.

+ Glenn McKechnie contributed a Perl script for making a netbootable
image from the Dachstein LRP firewall distribution floppy. It's in
contrib/mklrpnb/

+ At the request of Greg Beeley, who got irate mail from kernel NIC
developers, put in a warning in the Makefile about the 3c90x XCVR
options which may affect later operation with the Linux driver. For you
tinkerers out there, if you don't know what you're doing, please read
3c90x.txt over and over again until you understand what those options
do. If you don't understand, please ask on the Etherboot mailing list.
And don't complain to the kernel developers, it's nothing to do with
them. If you must change the XCVR options on a board, please document it
prominently on the board so that those who come after you won't
encounter strange behaviour and complain to the kernel developers.
Greg also supplied a patch to 3c90x.c to print a warning message.