RE: calling UNDI API

[Feng Shuo]

The interrupt handle is different between GRUB and Etherboot. I don't know
the detail, but this makes some Etherboot drivers not work properly in GRUB
(even with my diskless patch). For instance, the new pcnet32 driver hang in
GRUB, for it will raise an interrupt to initialize the card ---- the UNDI
driver has the similar problem :-(
In grub2, I think, we must make a decision on which framework to use before
we do anything, so that we may change the grub2 base code or architecture to
support the frame work better.

-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden
[mailto:address@hidden On Behalf Of Marco
Gerards
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 9:36 PM
To: The development of GRUB 2
Subject: Re: calling UNDI API

"Yoshinori K. Okuji" <address@hidden> writes:

> If you look at the header file include/grub/net.h, you can see what I 
> had in my mind. Basically, network devices should provide a generic 
> interface to network protocols.

Ok.

>> How will we support the other cards?  By using etherboot (or whatever
>> it was used in GRUB Legacy)?  What I would prefer is to have our own
>> TCP/IP stack that is platform independent.

> GRUB doesn't assume that hardware interrupts occur during normal
> execution, since this makes the implementation very complex, due to
> the switch between real mode and protected mode on i386. So I prefer
> the polling approach to the interruption-based approach. For this,
> Etherboot fits gracefully.

Ok, I agree.

> If my understanding is correct, Etherboot is now being ported to other 
> architectures, although it was only for i386 like GRUB Legacy. This 
> looks very interesting to us.

i did not know that.  Interesting indeed.

> BTW, do you really need TCP in GRUB? I know some people want to use TCP 
> protocols for netboot, such as HTTP and FTP. But I feel this is 
> overkill. If you need only UDP, it's quite easy to implement. You can 
> just copy the code from GRUB Legacy with a few modifications for 
> portability.

No, I just said TCP/IP because I am used to it and it is the name of
the protocol, I did not mean TCP specifically.  But I know a lot of
people would like TCP support.  It is at least an option that should
be left open, IMHO.

Thanks,
Marco



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