Hello Alan,
First things first. Tons of thanks for a mail FULLY LOADED with useful
information. I'm still to digest it all, but really thanks.
>> >
>> > I'm sure having a single driver for all the NICs is a feature cool
>> > enough to die for. Yes, it might have drawbacks like just pointed out
>> > by Peter, but surely a "single driver for all NIC" feature could prove
>> > to be great in some systems.
>> >
[Snip]
>
> Hi ... so there seem to be no technical feasibily issues, just
> reliabliy / ugly design issues? So one can still go ahead and write a
> Universal Protocol Driver that can work with all (PXE compatible)
> NICs?
With help from the Etherboot Project, I've recently implemented such a
driver for Etherboot 5.4. It currently supports PIO NICs (e.g. cards
that use in*/out* to interface with CPU). It's currently available in a
branch, and will be merged into the trunk by the Etherboot project. It
works reliably with QEMU + PXELINUX, with the virtual ne2k-pci NIC.
Umm ... pardon me if I am wrong, but I think you implemented a "UNDI
Driver" (i.e. the code that provides implementation of UNDI API, and
often resides in the NIC ROM) . I'm looking forward to write a
"Universal Protocol Driver" (i.e. the code that will be a linux kernel
module and will, use the UNDI API provided by your UNDI driver).
But nevertheless your information has been *VERY* helpful ...
At minimum, one needs to be able to probe for !PXE presence, which means
you need to map in 0-1MB of physical memory. The PXE stack's memory also
needs to be mapped in. My UNDI driver relies on a kernel module, generic
across all NICs, to accomplish these by mapping in the !PXE probe area
and PXE memory in a user process.
I'm pretty newbie to PXE, but I I think !PXE structure is used to find
out the location & size of PXE & UNDI runtime routines, by UNIVERSAL
PROTOCOL DRIVERS. Is my understanding wrong?
Also, I think that UNDI driver routine will need not call PXE routines
(TFTP / DHCP etc) as UNDI routines would be at a lower level providing
access to the bare bones hardware. Is this correct?
Thanks,
Dan
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
[Index of Archives]
[Kernel Newbies]
[Netfilter]
[Bugtraq]
[Photo]
[Stuff]
[Gimp]
[Yosemite News]
[MIPS Linux]
[ARM Linux]
[Linux Security]
[Linux RAID]
[Video 4 Linux]
[Linux for the blind]
[Linux Resources]
