Re: pci support

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

Marco Gerards wrote:
> vincent guffens <v.guffens@imperial.ac.uk> writes:
> 
> Hi Vincent,
> 
> 
>>I was wondering if there was still an interest in pci support as
>>discussed previously. That is a general interface exported by a module
>>such as
> 
> 
> Yes, that will make it possible to implement all kinds of drivers and
> make something like lspci possible.
> 
> Sorry I still didn't start working on the networking stuff as planned.
> Scripting and other stuff occupies me longer than I originally
> expected. :)

Sure, no problem! In fact, I was wondering if it would be possible to
have a discussion about the overall networking strategy that will be put
in place for grub2 (and which is schedulled for the next release !).

As I understand, supporting the etherboot drivers is no longer the
primary option. As it is out of the question to have its own set of
driver,  the UNDI driver seems like a good idea. However, UNDI support
would constrain significantly the design of the network stack. In
particular, it defines a lot of structure such as dhcp header, ipv4
addresses and so on. It also involves interruption while it was assumed
previously that the interfaces would be polled.

There is also the option of calling etherboot from grub2, which seems
quite appealing but I think I don't really quite get that.

cheers!