Re: [Etherboot-developers] World domination, anyone?

[<ebi...@ln...>]

"Timothy Legge" <tl...@ro...> writes:

> > I'll start by listing some of the things that personally come to mind:
> > 
> > 	o USB support
> 
> I am interested in this area.  Right at the moment, I would be more
> capable of porting the Pegasus driver than the subsystem.  The spec is
> still gathering dust here.

USB is on my long range wish list.  But it has not become a real project yet.
Though I am more likely to support USB disks than NICs.

Oh.  And I forgot to add earlier.
        o ``Trusted'' booting

> > 	o PCMCIA support
> 
> I may have access to a Laptop in the near future and this may be of some
> interest.  I suspect that supporting this with a hack (similar to the
> 3c515's ISAPNP) would be fairly easy.
> 
> > 	o UNDI driver
> > 	o PXE Support
> > 
> ???
> 
> > But what do you think?  If we went for PXE or UNDI, where are the big
> > wins? I'm always thinking about ways Etherboot could be used by more
> > people, and how we could become even more useful as a component
> > technology.
> 
> To throw it out there is there any possibility of Etherboot replacing
> PXE as a Standard?  
> 
> Also, if there was a way to end the need to tag kernels that would
> probably win some points.

Supporting pxelinux would certainly strengthen our position.


> > Btw, this is much more than of theoretical interest. I'd like to see
> us
> > implement something really cool for LinuxWorld Expo SF in August, and
> I
> > may be able to swing some limited funding for some of this.
> 
> Cooler than booting an OS through a NIC? ;-)

He might have to join up with those guys porting LinuxBIOS to the
epia.  Booting an OS through a NIC from the ROM chip.  And GPL'd
code the whole way :)
 
> > Ok, so go ahead. What do you think would be cool to do? Could you do
> > it? Do you know who could or would? And, most importantly, would it
> > bring us closer to WoRLd DomINatIoN? ;)
> > 
> Way out there (is it even possible).  Supercomputer status diskless
> cluster?

MCR is the #5 ranked supercomputer and it boots over the network
using etherboot.
http://top500.org/list/2002/11
The nodes have hard drives for their filesystems.

There is also Pink at LANL which is diskless (A 16M compaq flash
used as an extra big rom does not count).  It boots over Myrinet
so it does not use etherboot except for the ide_disk driver to load
it's bootloader.

The challenge right now is to find a good network filesystem.  Booting
the cluster is no problem (especially with multicast support).  But
even atftp has managed to cope.  It is not fast though.

Eric