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

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

>- 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.

The one rejig that would help a lot is to convert the calls to 16 bit
PCBIOS from inline calls to general calls.  This would remove the need
for the 32 bit stack to live in the same 64kB as the code. Then I could
for example, move Etherboot to start at 0x84000, and take all 112kB
(minus anything taken by the BIOS) up to 0xA0000. In fact, with memory
so abundant, one could declare all of the lower 640kB fair game when
loading bzImage Linux.  I realise you're targeting LinuxBIOS, but
freeing PCBIOS calls from this limitation would allow both to move ahead
together. It would also help Etherboot to be moved to top of memory with
an interface stub in low memory later.  Possibilities widen here,
dynamic loading of modules, etc.