Re: [Etherboot-developers] [RFC] Relocation techniques...

[Markus G. <ma...@gu...>]

Ken Yap wrote:
> I'm not a big fan of callbacks either, it means designing another
> interface which is slightly architecture dependent.

I guess, it depends on what kind of callbacks you decide to expose. I was mostly 
thinking of making the networking driver available to the second stage loader. 
It should be possible to design a architecture-independent API to do so.

If we have this ability, then it becomes trivial to do such things as:

  - write an externally-configurable graphical second stage loader. I think, 
this has been discussed a few weeks ago, and it seemed that the current API 
makes it difficult to fully implement this code. Mostly, because there is 
currently no good way to load configuration files and graphics files from the 
second stage code (or have I overlooked some feature in the API that provides 
this ability?)

  - expose etherboot NIC drivers to the loaded Linux kernel. Admittedly, our 
drivers are not optimized for production use in a general-purpose OS, but this 
should be a great option for a rescue kernel that is guaranteed to run on any 
machine which can load etherboot.

  - maybe, some enterprising soul will even get around and implement full PXE on 
top of etherboot. I don't particularly care for PXE, but requests for it keep 
being made.


Markus

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Markus Gutschke
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