Re: [Etherboot-developers] DHCP option 175

[Michael B. <mb...@fe...>]

On 21 May 2002, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > > Can we change this to return the PCI vendor id and device id's.  This
> > > makes changes in etherboot transparent to configurations.
> > > Something like:
> > > "PCI:8086:1229" for an Intel NIC
> > > "PCI:10b7:9805" for a 3COM NIC
> > > For PNPISA devices there is a similiar string we can use.  And for
> > > straight ISA we might want to just use the vendor and part number.
> > > Especially as there aren't 1-1 mappings between etherboot and foobar.
> > This change would make it significantly harder to maintain a DHCP server.
> > If Etherboot sends the driver name then the DHCP server configuration only
> > needs to know about the 36 Etherboot drivers.  If Etherboot sends the
> > vendor and device IDs then the DHCP server configuration needs to know
> > about the 112 different cards currently in the Etherboot database.
> > Additionally, new card definitions are likely to be added a lot more
> > frequently than new drivers(?)
> But the process could be fully automated by looking at the etherboot
> database, and the kernel module database (/lib/modules/xxx/pcimap).
> Both of which are list the vendor id, and device id of the card.   So
> once setup the worst you will have to do is rerun a script, that
> accomplishes the mapping.
> > If there is a better way to achieve this than sending the Etherboot driver
> > name, please let me know!
> So in summary I think the PCIID->kernel module mapping is much more
> of a constant setup situation than sending etherboot driver names.
> In particular you don't even have care about what etherboot will
> support you just have to worry about what you can support.

OK, this I like.  Is there any easy way to identify which rows in pcimap
correspond to network-card modules?

Michael Brown
http://www.fensystems.co.uk
--
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