Re: [Etherboot-developers] Question on supporting nVidia .o driver

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

>Over at the xbox linux project there is some discussion today about 
>supporting the nVidia inside the xbox (and used on nForce motherboards) 
>Ethernet controller with an etherboot driver.
>
>The issue is that nVidia supply a .o file containing all the goodies; it 
>  is believed to be quite possible to fake up something using the kernel 
>network API to use this and make it believe it was a kernel driver.

You realise that Linux NIC drivers and Etherboot NIC drivers are
different kinds of animals? Read the Etherboot developers manual if you
want to understand what the difference is. A shim for Linux would be
different from a shim for Etherboot. If you can code up an Etherboot
shim and GPL that, I don't see any problem. Another problem you might
face is that the Etherboot execution environment is much more
parsimonious than the kernel environment. If the nVidia .o is
self-contained, that might not be a problem.