Advice on NFS support in grub

[Olivier Galibert]

Now to I've finished building my sandbox computer, I'm going to add
NFS support to grub.  I mean complete nfs support, including multiple
servers, automatic completion on mountpoints and filenames, and
someday dns.  I have several possible strategies, and I'm not
completely sure which one to use:

- move the netboot code to etherboot 4.6.7 (which has a minimal nfs
  support), forward port the changes there already is in grub, then
  extend what's there (and do the forward port dance again each time a
  new etherboot version comes out?).

- split the existing netboot code into drivers (left unchanged) and
  protocols (splitting the humungus main.c in the process) and add the
  new ones.  Maybe update the drivers to 4.6.7 while I'm at it (which
  should be easy, even in the future, given that there is no reason to
  change _them_).

- trash what is there, and do a drivers/protocols splitted version
  using the oskit drivers (also known as, nicely wrapped freebsd 3.x
  drivers).

- trash what is there, and do a drivers/protocols splitted version
  using the linux 2.4 drivers and maybe even part of its network stack
  we don't need tcp yet, do we?  Otoh, it would be nice to be able to
  telnet to grub).

The non-nice part about options 3 and 4 would be the move from a
lightweight polling network infrastructure to a fully interrupt-driven
system.

Okuji, Gordon, others, your point of view?

  OG.