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

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

>The UNDI driver discussion seemed interesting as 
>well, though I need Peter or Vasil to explain how it works -- one more 
>time :)

I like the sound of this one actually.  My impression is that the idea
is that the driver calls UNDI software interrupts. In Etherboot this
would require a bunch of stub routines in asm callable from C. I don't
know what the UNDI entry points are like? Are they low level, like
read/write a network packet, or high level, like get a file by TFTP?
Where are the readable specs? Ok, maybe just some specs? :-) What
revision level of the specs should we be aiming for? Peter or Vasil?

>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.

Supporting UNDI would allow Etherboot to run on NICs to which Etherboot
has not been ported but UNDI is available in the PXE code.

Supporting PXE would be another step and would allow Etherboot to be
plugged into existing PXE infrastructure.

Apropos of something else, does anybody know if recent BIOSes support
booting from USB flash, or is that regarded as too prone to abuse? If
USB booting is supported, does it work like a floppy disk?