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

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

>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.

Relax, I know Perl like an old friend.  I bet you tried to sum each byte
with a loop containing a substr.  Perl has a built-in for doing
checksums, see unpack in perlfunc(1). Here's a quickie to verify that
the a ROM image checksums to 0.

#!/usr/bin/perl
$/ = 0777;
$sum = unpack("%8C*",<>);
print "$sum\n";

And here's a run on a 1 MB file picked at random:

$ ls -l /boot/vmlinuz_2418
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root      1008337 Mar  7 14:02
/boot/vmlinuz_2418
$ time /tmp/c.pl < /boot/vmlinuz_2418
95

real    0m0.027s
user    0m0.020s
sys     0m0.010s

>> 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.

But you haven't found out yet if an image can actually contain multiple
PCI headers and do the right thing.