More analysis to the old problem with etherboot+GRUB (diskless/disk)

[Christoph Plattner]

Hello GRUB and Etherboot people,

        finally I had some time to further analysing the
problem, I describer a week ago. 

The problem was: I can boot our (company's) OS (multiboot,
loaded at 1MB) with a GRUB booted by floppy, kernel and
modules loaded via tftp (plus bootp before...)

The OS crashes, if I do the same on a diskless booted GRUB.

Discussions with KEN YAP leads me to the fact, that the 
problem is the ethernet board used twice and is perhaps
not resetted in the correct way. So I did an experiement
unsing to different types of ethernet boards. A working
combination was a NE2000/PCI for etherboot and the i82559
or 559er base board for the GRUB to download.

The result: THE SAME. The kernel crashes.
(By the way, I also tried to embedd the eepro100.c file
of 4.7.18 into GRUB to have the newest driver... there !).

So the problem seems not to be direct a problem concerning
ethernet chip handling. So I have again to analyse the
differences in those two GRUB versions. Which point can
influence the loading of this kernel. I really have no
idea, yet. There are only some lines of C code different.

And I often use diskless GRUB + Etherboot for Linux, and
I never had problems... on really many different machines
and embedded industrial PCs.

With friendly regards

        Christoph P.


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