[Etherboot-developers] On disk drivers and other things...

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

Just a couple of random thoughts before I call this enough for now.
I need to get LinuxBIOS ready so manufacturing can use it, and then
I can get back to improving it's bootloader.

- I have finally realized why I am having so much trouble getting
  disk support integrated in.   The current code in floppy.c really
  is extremly special purpose and only good if all you want to load
  is a boot sector.  A lot of the more general purpose problems are not
  handled.  Such as floppy geometry detection.

- Size limitations.  Currently etherboot is limited to just 64K.  And
  while that is fine if it is just booting off one nic.  Going the
  full general purpose route is more difficult.  And I like to be able
  to have a build with all of the etherboot drivers included.  So this
  pretty much requires some deep architecture work, to go bigger.  I
  was hoping to avoid this oh, well.

- Imprtance of size.  As I work with the etherboot code I'm coming to
  realize just how tuned it is for size.  The big player is how many
  strings and calls to printf the code has.  So disabling debugging
  helps a lot.

  For those people suggesting complicated multicast implementations
  in the driver where we keep lists of the multicast ip addresses we
  are listening to, I won't touch that.   The performance impact would
  have to be huge, to justify a size increase.

Eric