netboot related projects

netboot related projects

[vincent guffens]

Hi,

I just wanted to let you know that I contacted the maintainer of
Etherboot to inform him of my current attempt to port the etherboot
drivers to grub2.

As I understand (don't hesitate to correct me or give more details if
you know them), the development of etherboot will stop and future
development will be done on a new project called gpxe. This will occur
shortly when Etherboot will reach its version 5.5. gpxe will have more
features such as memory allocation, availability for more platforms and
so on. gpxe will also replace the development of nilo.

The etherboot drivers will be used but I was told that the interface
will change.

--
	Vincent Guffens

Re: netboot related projects

[Marco Gerards]

vincent guffens <v.guffens@imperial.ac.uk> writes:

Hi Vincent,

> I just wanted to let you know that I contacted the maintainer of
> Etherboot to inform him of my current attempt to port the etherboot
> drivers to grub2.

Is he willing to cooperate with us so it will be easier to share code?
I think I once sent him an email about it...  But I am not sure
anymore. :-)

--
Marco

Re: netboot related projects

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Saturday 29 April 2006 22:15, Marco Gerards wrote:
> vincent guffens <v.guffens@imperial.ac.uk> writes:
>
> Hi Vincent,
>
> > I just wanted to let you know that I contacted the maintainer of
> > Etherboot to inform him of my current attempt to port the etherboot
> > drivers to grub2.
>
> Is he willing to cooperate with us so it will be easier to share code?
> I think I once sent him an email about it...  But I am not sure
> anymore. :-)

Honestly, I don't like to copy Etherboot's drivers to GRUB any longer. I 
rather consider how to use the UNDI interface provided by Etherboot. When I 
worked on netboot in GRUB Legacy, Etherboot didn't support UNDI, so I had to 
copy the drivers. According to him, the current Etherboot supports UNDI, so 
it should be feasible to use Etherboot's drivers via UNDI.

I think the difficulty is the case where GRUB is not loaded by Etherboot, for 
example, when GRUB boots from a disk directly. In this case, one way would be 
to hack Etherboot so that Etherboot can be invoked by GRUB and give the 
control back to GRUB.

From the experience of GRUB Legacy, I know how painful to synchronize code 
with an external project, so I'd like to investigate this direction.

Okuji

Re: netboot related projects

[vincent guffens]

Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:
> On Saturday 29 April 2006 22:15, Marco Gerards wrote:
> 
>>vincent guffens <v.guffens@imperial.ac.uk> writes:
>>
>>Hi Vincent,
>>
>>
>>>I just wanted to let you know that I contacted the maintainer of
>>>Etherboot to inform him of my current attempt to port the etherboot
>>>drivers to grub2.
>>
>>Is he willing to cooperate with us so it will be easier to share code?
>>I think I once sent him an email about it...  But I am not sure
>>anymore. :-)
> 
> 
> Honestly, I don't like to copy Etherboot's drivers to GRUB any longer. I 
> rather consider how to use the UNDI interface provided by Etherboot. When I 
> worked on netboot in GRUB Legacy, Etherboot didn't support UNDI, so I had to 
> copy the drivers. According to him, the current Etherboot supports UNDI, so 
> it should be feasible to use Etherboot's drivers via UNDI.
> 
> I think the difficulty is the case where GRUB is not loaded by Etherboot, for 
> example, when GRUB boots from a disk directly. In this case, one way would be 
> to hack Etherboot so that Etherboot can be invoked by GRUB and give the 
> control back to GRUB.
> 
> From the experience of GRUB Legacy, I know how painful to synchronize code 
> with an external project, so I'd like to investigate this direction.

true, but this is why the idea here is to use the drivers without
modification or at least with as few modifications as possible. The
driver that I have working now (ns8390 to drive the qemu NE2000
emulation) works with no modification at all, it only requires the
inclusion of a few lines of code before the driver code and at the end
(i.e could be scripted in a general way). Further it does not put any
constraint on the GRUB interface. I don't know much about UNDI but I
checked that there is an UNDI driver in etherboot that could, I think,
be included just as mentioned above.


Of course, this require an additional "glue layer" which is not
particularly elegant. Please, let me know what you think about this way
of doing think as am I still spending some time of it in the hope that
it could be usefull for grub2 (the latest version can be found at
http://www.inma.ucl.ac.be/~guffens/grub2_netboot/ ).


--
	Vincent Guffens

Re: netboot related projects

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Sunday 30 April 2006 00:03, vincent guffens wrote:
> true, but this is why the idea here is to use the drivers without
> modification or at least with as few modifications as possible.

GRUB Legacy did the same, and failed in keeping the code up-to-date. Because:

- you still have to check all updated files every time.

- you depend on the internal API of Etherboot, so you need to develop glue 
code again and again.

I would say that this is not desirable, unless Etherboot developers make the 
internal API quite stable, and this is unlikely to happen. They have good 
reasons to change it from time to time.

IMHO, the only feasible approach is to depend on only the external API of 
Etherboot. This is the UNDI interface. Fortunately, if we use UNDI, we can 
provide the same feature for PXE ROMs as well, and UNDI is a standard. So I 
prefer to develop a network device based on UNDI rather than copying 
Etherboot drivers.

Okuji

grub-emu state of the art

[Eric Salomé]

Hi,

I need a working grub-emu to continue the port of a system of my own
from grub to grub 2.

I am currently working on a i386 pc and had hard time the first days
with the 1.93 delivery : grub-emu would run (on Linux based Ubuntu OS)
and come with a rescue mode prompt, but was not likely to load and init
modules such as "normal.mod" (even by hand).

Am I doing something wrong or is it the current state of grub-emu ?

In the latter case, I'd  be glad to help a little and see what can be
done to have a fully functional grub-emu.

Best regards.
_________________________________________
Eric Salomé - Paris, France

Re: grub-emu state of the art

[Marco Gerards]

Eric Salomé <esalome@ctx.net> writes:

> I need a working grub-emu to continue the port of a system of my own
> from grub to grub 2.

May I ask what you are working on?

> I am currently working on a i386 pc and had hard time the first days
> with the 1.93 delivery : grub-emu would run (on Linux based Ubuntu OS)
> and come with a rescue mode prompt, but was not likely to load and init
> modules such as "normal.mod" (even by hand).

You can't load modules from grub-emu and you do not have to.  If
everything went ok, the file grub_emu_init.c was generated and
contains a call to grub_normal_init.  So when starting grub-emu you
will get normal mode.

--
Marco