Re: [Etherboot-developers] PXE

[Vasil V. <vas...@sy...>]

On Tue, 23 Apr 2002 Rob...@ra... wrote:

> Could someone tell me what the state of the PXE code is when trying to use
> it with Linux?? When I try

It should be working with Linux. Plenty of people managed to use it. I use it
every day including all the other ways of loading etherboot. BTW, I even
managed to resize my Windows (and only) partition of my laptop by running
etherboot from PXE and loading a RAM disk with parted.

Incidently there are problems with DOS, because when PXE is supposed to be
unloaded it is still hooked to some interrupts. The previous version was fine
with DOS but then it didn't free some of the memory (which was holding the
interrupts). The guy who wrote pxelinux had a solution for this by
implementing a floppy in RAM. I don't have time right now to investigate fully
but will try to come up with a work around for DOS.

> bin32/e1000-ecop.rom,   the code produced works fine :)
>
> when I try
>
> bin32/e1000-ecop.pxe,  the code produced doesn't have the 55 AA signature
> and the file seems very small. It also doesn't work.

More details please. What failed, any messages? If you are trying to run the
second image from a ROM, this probably won't work. This image is to placed on
the server and then loaded by PXE. That's why it doesn't have the signature --
not required by PXE.

PXE standard is overly complicated and "apparently designed on a different
planet" (quote from Becker's Intel eepro100 driver about Intel network chips).
What's more different implementations may have bugs of their own. However, it
seems to be in a lot of manufactured NIC ROMs and a lot of people are scared
of "burning" a ROM. So it is useful sometimes.

Vasil