Re: [Etherboot-developers] UNDI driver

[Peter L. <P.L...@sy...>]

> There is now a very-nearly working UNDI driver in 5.1 CVS under
> arch/i386/drivers/net.  This driver allows Etherboot to work with any N=
IC
> for which an UNDI option ROM is provided.

It's annoying that neither Vasil nor I will get the glory, but I'm
pleased that someone has finally worked up the steam. Well done,
Michael.

> The driver does not require Etherboot to be started by chaining from PX=
E;  =

> it will scan for an UNDI ROM and initialise it fully from scratch.  I h=
ave
> been testing by booting from floppy, which works fine. =


Nice.... we can have driver specific builds with a PXE "last resort"
driver regardless of the mechanism.

Thought - can the UNDI driver avoid the annoying attribute of 3Com's PXE
initialisation (and therefore probably everyone else's, though I haven't
tried) with multiple NICs that the MAC address used is that of the
*last* NIC to initialise? This confuses people because it almost always
means that it never uses the one that Linux calls eth0.

> I imagine that PXE-chaining would also work, although I haven't tested
> it yet.

PXE chaining is, of course, what lots of people want so that they don't
have to worry about loading the right driver. Just remember to leave PXE
loaded, since by default the first act of PXE-chaining to is to unload
PXE.  :)

Most people just pick up pxelinux as a compiled image and have no reason
to build. I'll be interested to see how many people want a no-brainer
PXE/UNDI image, as opposed to driver-specific, from rom-o-matic.

> Ideally, I'd like to create a file undi_wrapper.S in =

> arch/i386/drivers/net and have this linked in.  I suspect I'm going to =

> have to edit genrules.pl to achieve this, unless anyone can suggest a =

> quick and easy method?

Dumb question - does anything make UNDI fundamentally different from a
nic driver? That's how people will want to treat it, so I say treat it
exactly like a driver, with the possible exception that UNDI is included
by default as a last resort driver for PXE images but not others.