Re: Time to fork the netboot code?

[Mario Klebsch]

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On Wednesday,  9. May 2001 08:53, Chip Salzenberg wrote:
> According to OKUJI Yoshinori:
> > > > So transition to a more powerful set of device drivers
> > > > would be necessary.
> > >
> > > Hm.  Has anyone started on this?
> >
> > No, AFAIK. However, you cannot do this alone. It is necessary to
> > implement real memory management and handle protected-mode
> > interrupts and real-mode ones concurrently, using v86-mode. That is
> > exactly the plan which should be done after 1.0 release.
>
> OK, good to know.  I do have some short-term goals which can only be
> met by further hacking on the Etherboot drivers.

Just out of interest:

How much do the netboot (etherboot?) developers know about grub? Did
they ever use their drivers with grub?

If I understood the code right, the etherboot people are calling the
functions in config.c, which is then calling the various drivers.

I think, it should be possible to change the interface between config.c
and the network drivers to better fit grub's needs. Grub could use the
drivers either through config.c (in this case probably nothing is won)
or using the new interface. etherboot could either continue to use the
config.c interface or merge this code with the rest of their project
and switch to the new interface, too.

The goal would be to convert the situation from

        the grub people using the drivers of the etherboot people

to

        the grub and etherboot people are using common drivers.

73, Mario
- --
Mario Klebsch                                           address@hidden
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