Re: [Etherboot-developers] Missing NIC Drivers

[Michael B. <mb...@fe...>]

> >> Then of course there are the wireless NICs which are very popular.
> >Are the wireless pci cards any different from standard pci NICs?
> I should think they look just like any other PCI NIC on the bus, but
> there is the encryption key setting. Anybody know different?

Current code uses no encryption, although this would be fairly trivial to 
add.  Encryption could always be switched on after you've downloaded and 
booted the kernel, anyway.

There are slightly more stages to getting a wireless NIC initialised; you 
have to join to an access point before you can transmit or receive.  With 
the Prism2 cards (the only ones currently supported by Etherboot), you 
also have to deal with the Info frames (out-of-band information) that 
arrive, otherwise your card's receive buffer gradually fills up.

Also, the current code supports a PLX adaptor, i.e. a wireless PCMCIA card 
slotted into a PCMCIA-to-PCI adaptor card.  This means that you have to 
implement some aspects of PCMCIA: initialising the PLX chip, looking for 
the PCMCIA card and doing the ISA-style initialisation of the PCMCIA card 
before you can even start talking to the actual wireless hardware.

Michael