[Etherboot-developers] Re: Etherboot Broadcom driver

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

>Second, I did not have much success with FreeBSD.  Although the 
>documentation says that I do not need a tagged image for freeBSD, when I 
>try to boot FreeBSD it says something about not fitting in any segment 
>or something to that effect and goes into a retry loop.  Could you shed 
>some light on this?

You need to compile with -DIMAGE_FREEBSD. This happens automatically
under FreeBSD but needs to be set when compiling under Linux.

>Third, my reason for using the diskless boot is to have both linux and 
>freeBSD available.  I have put together a new machine with hardware some 
>of which have linux drivers but not FreeBSD and vice versa.  An example 
>is a Broadcomm 1000Mb ethernet driver.  I believe it has something to do 
>with the Tigon TG3 ( chip ?).  There is a driver for this under linux 
>and it works well after the system is booted.  However, there is no 
>etherboot driver for it.  I have put in another common ethernet card to 
>get around this.
>
>I find myself with some spare time and would like to take a shot at 
>writing (leveraging) a driver.  I have not written a device driver 
>before.  I am comfortable with C.  I have no microprocessor experience 
>but fortunately the source code for the OS driver is available under 
>linux.  I have read your developers doc and somewhere you mention that 
>you are willing to assist in such ventures. Could you let me know if it 
>is a reasonable project and the best starting point?

It is a good idea but Eric Biederman has already started one and if Eric
cannot get a driver to work, nobody can. It's in the 5.1 CVS tree,
tg3.c. You can help us test it when it's further along.

Further discussion moved to Etherboot developer mailing list.