[Etherboot-developers] Etherboot codebase - alternate use

[Robb M. <ma...@ac...>]

Hi Eric,

You did extensive restructuring of the Etherboot codebase, and also did
major surgery on memtest86. There is a natural (?) extension of the two
applications that I have been pondering for some time.

Etherbooting memtest86 is great, and a great way to test / burn-in test new
PCs, with one exception - it requires a screen to view output and that does
not provide a way to record failures. I realize you can redirect the console
via the serial port, but that is not very useful, and still requires another
working IO channel (a UART, instead of video). Given that memtest86 is most
useful to validate untrusted hardware, it would make sense to minimize the
requirements of the hardware to test. Since Ethernet is already required to
etherboot, it is assumed to be a basic requirement.

How difficult would it be to hack memtest86 to use the etherboot codebase to
generate UDP packets to send to a syslog server?  The syslog service can be
setup to log to a different file based on IP address.  This would allow
testing of a large array of PCs, and logging of the test results for
record-keeping purposes.

The syslog facility might also be of use to debug driver issues - ones that
did not prevent sending of UDP packets.

The NIC.C file in the current tree seems a prime candidate for further
splitting to multiple files based on protocol (i.e., one for DHCP, one for
TFTP, one for UDP, etc.), this also affects the Makefiles, but the advantage
would be ease of (ab)use to implement etherboot routines for other purposes,
such as the memtest86 hack.

What do you think?
Robb.