Re: [Etherboot-developers] Etherboot 5.1.2rc7 released

[Doug A. <amb...@am...>]

Eric W. Biederman writes:
| I will check it out.  At least with the FreeBSD pxe code someone
| contributed it depended on headers that are only present on FreeBSD.
| And that code at least is broken in 5.1.x

I guess the should be looked at.  I know when I added the FreeBSD support
back in (the original code came from FreeBSD) I made that support not
depend on FreeBSD headers.
 
| It is nice to know that FreeBSD still works with etherboot.  It would
| be nice if etherboot did not need FreeBSD specific code but that is

Well I like that I don't have to run a "munger" on the FreeBSD kernel
to boot it.  I use menus to boot different versions etc.  nbgrub for
example can take a raw bzImage and boot Linux.  It also can
take a raw {Free,Open,Net}BSD kernels.  So I just have sym-links
into those trees.  Then when I netboot them I just do a make depend &&
make && make install && reboot and then boot the new kernel.
I also like the PXE environment for DOS a little better since 
I can just run mtools on the image that PXE downloads.  I've had
some issues with mknbi not working with some DOS programs but
the PXE stuff just worked.  I think it was PC Doctor (a PC diags
program) that blew up.

The biggest thing I like about Etherboot is that all the source is
there so I can add code to drive special hardware and select 
manufacturing or normal boot modes and then stick that into
a system BIOS and build a customized psuedo firmware especially
when I don't have source the the system BIOS.  Even then building the
system BIOS can be a pain if you require DOS or OS/2 to build it.
Etherboot can easily be built.  I am starting to migrate some things
to PXE using the PXE patches for isc-dhcp.  The biggest draw back is that
PC stuff uses the VGA/kernel for the console.

| another issue.  Do you know if there is any interest in running
| FreeBSD under LinuxBIOS?

Probably.  We might use it in our product assuming is supported our
chipset.  Having a BIOS that worked through the serial port and have
not worry about CMOS setting would be a good thing.  We use the
i845E chipset in our next generation hardware.

Doug A.