Re: [Etherboot-developers] changes checked into CVS

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

>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.

Originally it wasn't in the structure but to make sure the structure is
well aligned, I prepended it. It also saves copying. This is only an
implementation detail. I agree it's ugly.

>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.

Mandrake should not be using test distributions. Everything is subject
to change until the official release. I have no sympathy for Mandrake.

It's not packet size I care so much about as code size.

>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. :-(

But you'd have to do the same thing for other binary strucutres in
dhcpd.conf. Can't you use colon notation?