Re: [Etherboot-developers] changes checked into CVS

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

On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Michael Brown wrote:
> > I have checked into CVS:
> > For 5.0.7 and 5.1.2 candidates:
> > Changes to NIC identification scheme from variable length string to
> > fixed binary structure. Added ISA IDs to drivers.
> > Please sync your working copy with cvs update.
> A couple of issues:
> 1. the "nic_id" struct now contains the length of the
>    etherboot-encapsulated-options packet, which does not belong in this
>    struct since it is unrelated to the NIC id.
> 2. These changes break backwards compatibility for the sake of 8 bytes
>    saved in the DHCP request packet (which is not really size-critical).
>    I know that the Mandrake distribution has already included related code
>    that depends the old-format NIC ID scheme present in RC1.
> I really think that we should revert to the old plain-text method, where
> the IDs were strings such as "PCI:1186:1300" rather than a binary sequence
> 0x01,0x86,0x11,0x00,0x13.  Aside from anything else, it makes a real mess
> of dhcpd.conf files to start manipulating binary structures like this. :-(

Forgot to mention: I've also burned about 200 copies of the RC1 code into
silicon for various customers, since I was happy that RC1 worked
sufficiently well for my needs.  It's going to cause me and them a lot of
hassle if I have to replace 200 EPROMs because of a change that broke
backwards compatibility between RC1 and final release.

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