Re: netboot related projects

[vincent guffens <v.guffens@imperial.ac.uk>]

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