Re: status of grub netboot in GRUB2 - Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko

From: "Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko" <phcoder@gmail.com>
To: Manoel Rebelo Abraches <mrabran@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: grub-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: status of grub netboot in GRUB2
Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2010 22:37:22 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <4C800B02.8010208@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1283402286.26417.6.camel@abranches-laptop>

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On 09/02/2010 06:38 AM, Manoel Rebelo Abraches wrote:
> That branch is a bit outdated, I'll update id until next week at most.
> We have so far the tftp protocol and a pseudo driver for open firmware.
> It worked grate in our tests so far. 
Sounds interesting.
> Though it is aimed only for
> sequential transfer at the moment, I'll talk with vladimir next week
> some about some changes I thought to make parallelism easier( but isn't
> parallelism too much for a bootloader?).
>   
Hardware drivers are always useful to be parallelisable even if we
currently don't tak full advantage of it. A simple example is that of
running console through network and in the same time downloading files.
In this case you require 2 simultaneous transfers.

I've also found out that pxe driver is currently attached all wrong. In
branch net I transformed it into a network protocol 'pxe' using
interface 'pxe' on dummy card 'pxe'. With UNDI the 'pxe' card will
become a card capable of sending and receiving packets.
This pushed me to remove some overkill in previous templates. I hope
that helps writing drivers.
@Manoel: even if you just put your current work without cleaning it up
it will already help. I can take care of integration.
> On Tue, 2010-08-31 at 21:31 +0200, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko
> wrote:
>   
>> On 08/31/2010 09:05 PM, John Lumby wrote:
>> First of all please avoid sending HTML-formatted mails to this list.
>>     
>>> Anyone know if any work is being done on implementing a netboot
>>> function into GRUB2 similar to what is available in GRUB1?    I.e.,  
>>>    .   supports current network hardware with self-contained drivers
>>>    .  does not require PXE hardware
>>>    .  does not require any other software
>>>
>>>       
>> This is useful functionality for e.g. OS recovery over internet, system
>> where firmware supports netboot but provides only pretty unusable
>> functions to bootloader or when GRUB itself is a firmware
>> Manoelo Abranches is working on this feature:
>> http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/grub/people/mrabran/grub_net/ . One of the
>> tasks in my TODO list is to assess how much can be merged into 1.99.
>>     
>>> I see this article in this forum talking about some plans
>>> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2006-05/msg00058.html
>>>
>>> and this one more recently
>>> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2008-01/msg00640.html
>>>
>>> -  but they are all years ago ...
>>>
>>> Or -  is there any kind of netboot functionality in GRUB2 or being
>>> worked on by anyone?
>>>
>>> John Lumby
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Grub-devel mailing list
>>> Grub-devel@gnu.org
>>> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
>>>   
>>>       
>>
>>     
>   


-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko


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