From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "H. Peter Anvin" Subject: Re: Univeral Protocol Driver (using UNDI) in Linux Date: Mon, 07 Aug 2006 08:09:17 -0700 Message-ID: <44D7579D.1040303@zytor.com> References: <292693080608070339p6b42feacw9d8f27a147cf1771@mail.gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <292693080608070339p6b42feacw9d8f27a147cf1771@mail.gmail.com> Sender: linux-net-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format="flowed" To: Daniel Rodrick Cc: Linux Newbie , kernelnewbies , linux-net@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Daniel Rodrick wrote: > Hi list, > > I was curious as to why a Universal driver (using UNDI API) for Linux > does not exist (or does it)? > > I want to try and write a such a driver that could (in principle) > handle all the NICs that are PXE compatible. > > Has this been tried? What are the technical problems that might come in > my way? > It has been tried; in fact Intel did implement this in their "Linux PXE SDK". The UNDI API is absolutely atrocious, however, being based on NDIS2 which is widely considered the worst of all the many network stacks for DOS. Additionally, many UNDI stacks don't work correctly when called from protected mode, since the interface doesn't work right. Additionally, UNDI is *ONLY* available after booting from the NIC. -hpa