Re: [Etherboot-developers] NIC file and ROM images

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

ke...@us... writes:

> >Eric, I'm not sure what you mean.  According to
> >
> >    http://www.phoenix.com/PlatSS/PDFs/specs-bbs101.pdf
> >
> >Page 33, The PCI data structure seems only to occur once, and that is 
> >where the vendor and device IDs are.  The PNP expansion header is a 
> >chained structure, but does not have vendor or device information.  Maybe 
> >I don't understand what you mean.
> 
> Apropos of that, I guess it's time to revamp the ROM building
> procedures. The old NIC format is inadequate. I'm thinking of section
> that lists the base images, then a section that lists the derived
> images. The derived images can be made from a base image or another
> derived image by modifying the PCI IDs and checksums in situ.  Another
> program, say modrom, would do this. Makerom and modrom would be
> rewritten in Perl.

I'd be careful about using Perl for this kind of work.  I'm rather
turned off on Perl since I added code to compute a checksum and
Perl 5 seconds to checksum a 1Meg binary data.  That combined with the 
challenge of dealing with binary data in Perl causes me to suggest
that is is proabably  a more appropriate language for this task.

> The NIC file could also generate an include for config.c, so only one
> place needs to be changed to support another derived image.

That might be a good idea.  But it falls down on the multiple drives
in one NIC side.  I would be in favor of all of the PCI ID moving into
the drivers so drivers can be independent.

Eric