Re: Time to fork the netboot code?

[OKUJI Yoshinori]

From: Mario Klebsch <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: Time to fork the netboot code?
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 09:14:54 +0200

> OTOH, tghe drivers for booting have to be simple.

Why "have to"? There is no reason that drivers must be simple.

> Allthough the requirements differ, I am sure, it is possible to have
> both drivers in one source file, when using advanced preprocessor
> tricks. But this would at least require, that both driver flavours are
> maintained by the same set of people. If not, we will face the same
> problem, that we have today, with the etherboot drivers.

I disagree. Most problems we faced are that Etherboot drivers don't
work at all with several NICs and that they don't work well with
multiple NICs. It's not hard to just incorporate drivers from another
software package, in my experience with GNU Mach.

> So my suggestion would be to define a 'non-OS' network driver API,
> which is usable for all bootstrap projects, agree with these projects
> upon this API and then convert the existing drivers to the new API.

I bet that this never be realistic. As long as I see, Key Yap has no
interest in GRUB, and I feel even that he might assume that GRUB is a
competitor. Consider why UDI is not widely used.

Okuji