Re: [Etherboot-developers] Prism II (wireless) drivers

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

ke...@us... writes:

> >All now in CVS, including the multi-driver ROM stuff.  All builds fine on
> >my system, if anyone hits compile errors with my code please let me know.
> >
> >I tagged the three imported linux-wlan-ng header files with
> >Imported_linux_wlan_ng_0_1_13.  They are verbatim imports containing lots
> >and lots of constants.
> 
> Lovely thanks.
> 
> >I have discovered one minor bug: when I attempt to built a multi-driver
> >ROM containing three drivers (rtl8139, prism2_plx and prism2_pci) it has a
> >tendency to crash and reset the machine at random times.  My best guess
> >is that I am running out of memory and this is causing the resets when the
> >code tries to tread on non-existent RAM.  Any suggestions?
> 
> That's probably the stack colliding with the code. There's not much you
> can do without a major rework of Etherboot to claim more than one 64kB
> segment.

Cleaning up etherboot so it can get out of the way of the booted
image has been on my list for a while anyway.  Plus we have have the DOC
problem, which means in general we should keep etherboot lower in memory
possibly as low in memory as we can.

When I get a chance I will see about cleaning up/testing my work to get etherboot
out of the way of a loaded image.  Once we get that runtime size should not
be a problem, and we should be able to statically claim any address
we want.

I keep thinking of giving the 32bit segments different base addresses
but then etherboot would need to implement virt_to_bus (or
pci_alloc_consistent), and the drivers would all need to be changed.

Any solution for going beyond one 64K segment has the issue that
anything interacting with 16bit code needs to be isolated and looked
at.  Plus I guess there are some small loader issues.  Moving the
decompressor into 32bit code might make things easier. 

On the kernel side I have most of the hard work done, but I'm taking
a breather before I resubmit my patches.

Eric