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

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

On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, Peter Lister wrote:
> > Alternatively the type of NIC is supplied in the DHCP query.
> .
> > Given that it is safer for the loaded image to bring along it's
> > network driver, and stack, because the loaded image can be recompiled
> > and fixed.
> I agree with what you say, Eric, but this implies complexity on the
> dhcp server side to give out images with the right driver. People find
> that complicated, so there will be pressure to supply use the initial
> firmware driver to be nicely device indepedent.

It's not complicated to set up DHCPD to do this; you can find code that
will automate it completely in contrib/initrd.  As is, this will create
NBI files for each network module and will provide dhcpd.conf fragments
that deal with automatically selecting the correct NBI based on the
PCI/ISA IDs that Etherboot sends.  (I need to update this to use the
new binary structures.)

Michael