Re: calling UNDI API

[Marco Gerards <metgerards@student.han.nl>]

"Yoshinori K. Okuji" <okuji@enbug.org> writes:

> If you look at the header file include/grub/net.h, you can see what I 
> had in my mind. Basically, network devices should provide a generic 
> interface to network protocols.

Ok.

>> How will we support the other cards?  By using etherboot (or whatever
>> it was used in GRUB Legacy)?  What I would prefer is to have our own
>> TCP/IP stack that is platform independent.

> GRUB doesn't assume that hardware interrupts occur during normal
> execution, since this makes the implementation very complex, due to
> the switch between real mode and protected mode on i386. So I prefer
> the polling approach to the interruption-based approach. For this,
> Etherboot fits gracefully.

Ok, I agree.

> If my understanding is correct, Etherboot is now being ported to other 
> architectures, although it was only for i386 like GRUB Legacy. This 
> looks very interesting to us.

i did not know that.  Interesting indeed.

> BTW, do you really need TCP in GRUB? I know some people want to use TCP 
> protocols for netboot, such as HTTP and FTP. But I feel this is 
> overkill. If you need only UDP, it's quite easy to implement. You can 
> just copy the code from GRUB Legacy with a few modifications for 
> portability.

No, I just said TCP/IP because I am used to it and it is the name of
the protocol, I did not mean TCP specifically.  But I know a lot of
people would like TCP support.  It is at least an option that should
be left open, IMHO.

Thanks,
Marco