Status of UNDI Support

Status of UNDI Support

[Martin Vogt]

Hello grub2 developers,


I just tried pxegrub2, but I found out that the network support
is missing. (can load pxegrub, but no menu.lst or kernel etc....)

My experience with grub1 and the etherboot based nic support,
is that it does not work well, so I still use pxelinux.
I always thought that grub2 wont use etheboot and only supports UNDI,
like pxelinux.

Isnt it possible to re-use some UNDI support from pxelinux and put it
into grub2?


regards,

Martin






-- 




=============================================
 Martin Vogt
 ITWM - Fraunhofer Institut fuer
        Techno- und Wirtschaftsmathematik
 Fraunhofer-Platz 1
 D-67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
 Tel. +49 (0) 631/31600 4356, Fax -5356
=============================================

Re: Status of UNDI Support

[vincent guffens]

Martin Vogt wrote:

>Hello grub2 developers,
>
>
>I just tried pxegrub2, but I found out that the network support
>is missing. (can load pxegrub, but no menu.lst or kernel etc....)
>  
>
hi,

i have been working on netboot support for grub2 for a while and even 
got it working once using code from etherboot.
I am now grubifying the work in order to submit a patch. The PCI support 
is on its way and is going to feature an abstract interface which should 
ease the merging of new implementations.

>My experience with grub1 and the etherboot based nic support,
>is that it does not work well, so I still use pxelinux.
>I always thought that grub2 wont use etheboot and only supports UNDI,
>like pxelinux.
>
>  
>
As far as I know, a lot of  problems related to netboot in grub were 
linked to the fact that  the drivers could not easily be linked together 
as it could  result in grub freezing of behaving improperly. The idea in 
grub2 is still to use the etherboot drivers but not to be limited by 
them. There will be a "glue" layer in order to import the etherboot 
drivers, hopefully with as little modifications as possible, but it will 
be possible to extend that.

>Isnt it possible to re-use some UNDI support from pxelinux and put it
>into grub2?
>
>  
>

I don't know very much about this UNDI support but this is certainly not 
incompatible with using the etherboot drivers for supported cards 
anyway. Grub is very flexible and we can certainly have both support if 
it is worth it.

>regards,
>
>Martin
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  
>


-- 
		Vincent Guffens
		Intelligent Systems & Networks Group
		Research associate, Imperial College 

Re: Status of UNDI Support

[vincent guffens]

I am resending this mail, it looks that it didn't get through:


Martin Vogt wrote:

> Hello grub2 developers,
>
>
> I just tried pxegrub2, but I found out that the network support
> is missing. (can load pxegrub, but no menu.lst or kernel etc....)
>  
>
hi,

i have been working on netboot support for grub2 for a while and even 
got it working once using code from etherboot.
I am now grubifying the work in order to submit a patch. The PCI support 
is on its way and is going to feature an abstract interface which should 
ease the merging of new implementations.

> My experience with grub1 and the etherboot based nic support,
> is that it does not work well, so I still use pxelinux.
> I always thought that grub2 wont use etheboot and only supports UNDI,
> like pxelinux.
>
>  
>
As far as I know, a lot of  problems related to netboot in grub were 
linked to the fact that  the drivers could not easily be linked together 
as it could  result in grub freezing of behaving improperly. The idea in 
grub2 is still to use the etherboot drivers but not to be limited by 
them. There will be a "glue" layer in order to import the etherboot 
drivers, hopefully with as little modifications as possible, but it will 
be possible to extend that.

> Isnt it possible to re-use some UNDI support from pxelinux and put it
> into grub2?
>
>  
>

I don't know very much about this UNDI support but this is certainly not 
incompatible with using the etherboot drivers for supported cards 
anyway. Grub is very flexible and we can certainly have both support if 
it is worth it.

> regards,
>
> Martin
>
>
>
>

-- 
		Vincent Guffens
		Intelligent Systems & Networks Group
		Research associate, Imperial College 

Re: Status of UNDI Support

[Marco Gerards]

Martin Vogt <vogt@itwm.fraunhofer.de> writes:

Hi Martin,

> I just tried pxegrub2, but I found out that the network support
> is missing. (can load pxegrub, but no menu.lst or kernel etc....)
>
> My experience with grub1 and the etherboot based nic support,
> is that it does not work well, so I still use pxelinux.
> I always thought that grub2 wont use etheboot and only supports UNDI,
> like pxelinux.

At the moment GRUB 2 does not support networking.  But we are working
on that.

> Isnt it possible to re-use some UNDI support from pxelinux and put it
> into grub2?

I don't know.  I think it is better that we write it ourselves, it
does not appear too hard to implement...

--
Marco

Re: Status of UNDI Support

[Martin Vogt]

Marco Gerards wrote:
> Martin Vogt <vogt@itwm.fraunhofer.de> writes:
>
> Hi Martin,
>
>   
>> I just tried pxegrub2, but I found out that the network support
>> is missing. (can load pxegrub, but no menu.lst or kernel etc....)
>>
>> My experience with grub1 and the etherboot based nic support,
>> is that it does not work well, so I still use pxelinux.
>> I always thought that grub2 wont use etheboot and only supports UNDI,
>> like pxelinux.
>>     
>
> At the moment GRUB 2 does not support networking.  But we are working
> on that.
>
>   
>> Isnt it possible to re-use some UNDI support from pxelinux and put it
>> into grub2?
>>     
>
> I don't know.  I think it is better that we write it ourselves, it
> does not appear too hard to implement...
>
>   
Hi Marco,

thanks for your reply. I read a bit grub2-devel and found out that there
are some thoughts about linuxbios support.
I dont know if linuxbios has some abstraction for network access.
Usually (clusterenvironment) you get linuxbios with the right
etherboot  prom installed. The normal way for installing is
booting an .ebi installer.
The other way which somtimes is used, you go over pxe to
the right etherboot image and then load an ebi.
Only as an idea: It would be great if one grub binary could
work on then UNDI layer and the etherboot layer (if there is any).

But I dont know if this is possible at all.

regards,

Martin

Re: Status of UNDI Support

[Marco Gerards]

Martin Vogt <vogt@itwm.fraunhofer.de> writes:

Hi Martin,

> thanks for your reply. I read a bit grub2-devel and found out that there
> are some thoughts about linuxbios support.
> I dont know if linuxbios has some abstraction for network access.
> Usually (clusterenvironment) you get linuxbios with the right
> etherboot  prom installed. The normal way for installing is
> booting an .ebi installer.
> The other way which somtimes is used, you go over pxe to
> the right etherboot image and then load an ebi.
> Only as an idea: It would be great if one grub binary could
> work on then UNDI layer and the etherboot layer (if there is any).

GRUB is quite modular and it should be easy to this.  You can choose
which modules go into the pxe image.  There will be modules for
networking, the drivers and for UNDI.

--
Marco

Re: Status of UNDI Support

[Yedidyah Bar-David]

On Fri, Mar 10, 2006 at 03:07:36PM +0100, Marco Gerards wrote:
> Martin Vogt <vogt@itwm.fraunhofer.de> writes:
> > Isnt it possible to re-use some UNDI support from pxelinux and put it
> > into grub2?

While I do not know the internals of grub2, I guess some parts of it run
in protected mode, while pxelinux is realmode only. I think this means
it won't be easy to use parts of it.

> 
> I don't know.  I think it is better that we write it ourselves, it
> does not appear too hard to implement...

Looking at the sources of pxelinux, it seems somewhat more complex than
what you can tell from reading the specs, mainly because you want, as
reasonably as possible, to support also buggy PXE stacks etc. So while
it's probably not that hard, it would make sense to look at pxelinux for
reference if not for the code.

I personally was a user of both etherboot, grub with etherboot drivers
and grub with undi (which indeed did not work well for me back then - I
did not try it recently), and I agree it would make more sense for grub2
to support undi only, unlike grub legacy which tried to support
everything etherboot supported, which was probably too much
synchronization work and therefore did not work well.
-- 
Didi

Re: Status of UNDI Support

[Marco Gerards]

didi@tau.ac.il (Yedidyah Bar-David) writes:

> On Fri, Mar 10, 2006 at 03:07:36PM +0100, Marco Gerards wrote:
>> Martin Vogt <vogt@itwm.fraunhofer.de> writes:
>> > Isnt it possible to re-use some UNDI support from pxelinux and put it
>> > into grub2?
>
> While I do not know the internals of grub2, I guess some parts of it run
> in protected mode, while pxelinux is realmode only. I think this means
> it won't be easy to use parts of it.

GRUB is able to switch to realmode and back.  It's what's done when
accessing the BIOS to read from disk.

>> 
>> I don't know.  I think it is better that we write it ourselves, it
>> does not appear too hard to implement...
>
> Looking at the sources of pxelinux, it seems somewhat more complex than
> what you can tell from reading the specs, mainly because you want, as
> reasonably as possible, to support also buggy PXE stacks etc. So while
> it's probably not that hard, it would make sense to look at pxelinux for
> reference if not for the code.
>
> I personally was a user of both etherboot, grub with etherboot drivers
> and grub with undi (which indeed did not work well for me back then - I
> did not try it recently), and I agree it would make more sense for grub2
> to support undi only, unlike grub legacy which tried to support
> everything etherboot supported, which was probably too much
> synchronization work and therefore did not work well.

I prefer to support both.  The etherboot drivers usually work better
than UNDI, AFAIK.  But when etherboot does not support a card, people
can fall back to UNDI.  Don't forget that not all cards support UNDI,
so I don't want UNDI only.

--
Marco

Re: Status of UNDI Support

[Vesa Jääskeläinen]

Marco Gerards wrote:
> I prefer to support both.  The etherboot drivers usually work better
> than UNDI, AFAIK.  But when etherboot does not support a card, people
> can fall back to UNDI.  Don't forget that not all cards support UNDI,
> so I don't want UNDI only.

I think the many driver manufactures has NDIS drivers. So I think
supporting this option would be nice. Perhaps when the network driver
interface has been specified (and I have all critical parts in video
support done), I could check it out.

Here is the URL for it:
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

Thanks,
Vesa Jääskeläinen

Re: Status of UNDI Support

[Marco Gerards]

Vesa Jääskeläinen <chaac@nic.fi> writes:

> Marco Gerards wrote:
>> I prefer to support both.  The etherboot drivers usually work better
>> than UNDI, AFAIK.  But when etherboot does not support a card, people
>> can fall back to UNDI.  Don't forget that not all cards support UNDI,
>> so I don't want UNDI only.
>
> I think the many driver manufactures has NDIS drivers. So I think
> supporting this option would be nice. Perhaps when the network driver
> interface has been specified (and I have all critical parts in video
> support done), I could check it out.

NDIS drivers are non-free software.  We can't and will not support
this.  It can't even be done unofficially, in that case it will be a
license violation, AFAIK.

And besides that, using non-free software is just not the right thing
to do.

--
Marco

Re: Status of UNDI Support

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Saturday 11 March 2006 14:42, Marco Gerards wrote:
> NDIS drivers are non-free software.  We can't and will not support
> this.  It can't even be done unofficially, in that case it will be a
> license violation, AFAIK.

From purely legal point of view, this is in a gray zone. For example, if you 
compile GPL code on a proprietary C library, is this illegal? Note that BIOS 
and Open Firmware are not Free Software usually, but we still use them.

> And besides that, using non-free software is just not the right thing
> to do.

I agree.

Okuji