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

[Vasil V. <vas...@sy...>]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2003, Ken Yap wrote:

> >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?

I am actually interested into getting a driver that will use UNDI. Erik has
done quite a lot of the hard work implementing this on the IA64. I am not
quite sure at this stage how much of the specs are common, though. Anyone else
keen on doing this in the near future (month or so)?

I don't know whether I will get round to doing it soon but it looks like a
good idea unless someone is likely to get NIC manifucturers to put etherboot
on their NIC ROMs.

> >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.

Great benefit here -- don't care which NIC you are being loaded to and still
can use the flexibility of etherboot. If the UNDI is buggy, then use
etherboot's driver.

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

This will be most useful to NIC manufacturers and could be used to convince
them to use etherboot instead of just PXE. Then open sourcing their driver
will give them better support in the long run.

> 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?

How is this different in terms of abuse from booting off USB floppy, which
some BIOSes now support?

--
Vasil