[Etherboot-developers] On disk drivers and other things...
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marty_connor,
stefanhajnoczi
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From: <ebi...@ln...> - 2002-06-18 18:33:47
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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 |