Re: Feature request: network devices

[Bean]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 9:08 AM, Seth Goldberg <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
> Quoting Bean, who wrote the following on Wed, 11 Nov 2009:
>
>> On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 12:32 PM, Seth Goldberg <address@hidden>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>>  Enhancing the TFTP & PXE boot capabilities of GRUB2 is extremely
>>> important
>>> to our use of GRUB2, so if you're interested in doing this work, please
>>> let
>>> me know so we can coordinate our efforts.
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Isn't TFTP and PXE boot support in GRUB2 ready ?
>
>  Very basic support is.  We (Sun) added a number of other things to Legacy
> GRUB (i.e. the ability to select a configuration file based on information
> in the DHCP ACK without requiring the downloading of a base grub
> configuration file -- for the simplicity and consistency of our user base,
> that's what I need from GRUB2.  Requiring the users to have a grub.cfg with
> a bunch of if statements is a non-starter, so I'm "backporting" the grub
> configuration file specialization logic to GRUB2.).  We also pass the entire
> DHCP ACK via a non-compliant method in the multiboot structure -- Vladimir
> suggested he'd be cool with extended the multiboot spec to allow that
> explicitly.  It prevents the kernel from having to restart DHCP (and for it
> to know from which interface it was booted).  I need to check again, but i
> don't know if GRUB's TFTP functionality supports different TFTP block sizes
> (which is important for us, because the boot archive we load can be quite
> large and can overflow the TFTP packet counter -- I'm not sure if GRUB2
> deals with wraparound of that counter either).  So, to sum up, there are a
> number of things we need that don't exist right now.

Hi,

It's already implemented in my BURG branch, check this thread:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2009-10/msg00215.html

> And, as was mentioned,
> there's EFI support, which is also essential.  PXE under EFI exists appears
> to be as widespread as PXE on BIOS (modulo Apple hardware, as usual).

If you can find related document on how to use the firmware interface,
I can integrate it into grub.

-- 
Bean

My repository: https://launchpad.net/burg
Document: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Burg