OpenFirmware and interrupt-map

Peter Lister prl at peterlister.co.uk
Wed Feb 4 18:19:00 CET 2004


On Wed, 2004-02-04 at 14:31, Stefan Reinauer wrote:

> OpenBIOS is currently only reusing filesystem drivers from grub, but
> an interface for network booting so that etherboot drivers can be used
> should not overtop the fs efforts a lot. 

Digressing slightly, please note that Etherboot is more than just the
drivers - there is a significant amount of network code (now even TCP if
one wants it), and it would benefit us all to share as much as possible;
there is, for instance, an NFS client already.

For some reason best known to themselves, the GRUB developers decided to
use only Etherboot's drivers and brew their own network code. The result
is that GRUB netboot is now lagging noticeably behind Etherboot in
functionality, drivers etc - GRUB people now discuss "porting" Etherboot
drivers, which is disappointing (have a look at the GRUB support forum
and FAQ to see how little help there is on the network code compared to
disk and fs). It would have made far more sense to co-operate on an open
firmware network API, but hey ho... I'd like to see this happening
fairly soon, so that any driver created for Etherboot immediately works
with GRUB. So I encourage OpenBIOS to peacefully co-exist with GRUB and
Etherboot rather than fork which is not a good way to encourage driver
writers.

BTW, there is work now on implementing PXE on top of Etherboot -
pxelinux has already been demonstrated on top of Etherboot. This may
force the issue somewhat, since even if PXE isn't the API one wants, it
will at least help focus people into deciding what APIs they *do* want.





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