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

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

>That wouldn't have worked because I wasn't using that checksum
>algorightm.  Ever since playing with BASIC I'm alergic to using
>programming languages where you must use the builtins to get
>performance.

Well then the answer would have been one of the following:

Find a CPAN module that does what you want. E.g. there's a MD5 module.
Write an extension in C.
Don't use Perl

Perl doesn't cover all applications, but it's perfectly adequate in many
places where you't think only C will do the job, e.g. mknbi which does
binary manipulations and a streaming video server. It may be a long time
before we see an Etherboot in Perl though.

>What is clear is that you can have multiple rom images, with their
>own rom header on a 512 byte boundary.  What I don't know yet is
>if the rom scan algorithm supports those images overlapping.

I don't think the header has any "data offset" fields, the body just
follows the header.

>If they can overlap it is probably worth doing, without the ability
>to overlap we can just make certain etherboot rom images are in
>multiples of 512 bytes and concat rom images together if there are
>big enough roms.

That's easy, just concatenate the ROM images. At the moment they aren't
as small as they could be because they are padded out to the next power
of 2, but an additional option could allow them to be padded to the next
block only.