RE: does EtherBoot sopprts PXE?

["Luis Garrido" <lgv@abonados.cplus.es>]

-----Mensaje original-----
De: Ken Yap <ken@nhj.nlc.net.au>
Para: netboot@baghira.han.de <netboot@baghira.han.de>
Fecha: jueves, 27 de agosto de 1998 03:39 a.m.
Asunto: Re: does EtherBoot sopprts PXE?


>> > Is there a version in EtherBoot available which supports PXE?
>> > Is anyone working on this?
>>
>>Currently, it does not support PXE. In the future, this is one of the
>>features that NILO is supposed to have.
>
>Please note that this is not a priority for me personally in NILO,
>mainly because I do not have much of a stake in the result. There were
>some people interested in retrofitting PXE into Etherboot but I haven't
>heard anymore about it.

Well, actually I was, in order to match the BpBatch effort. But after
looking deeply into Etherboot code, I found it so patched and tricky that
fitting PXE specs would need an actual rebuilding of major parts of the
code.

I'm not ready to do this, specially the NIC driver parts. Actually, I found
Etherboot sources are rather dirty (please, don't offend, I'm sure it's due
to the natural evolution of the project and I've found some fine hacks into
the code which makes me think people involved are quite competent
programmers) and hard to patch taking care of all the zillion conditional
compilings included. Specially two backwards compatibility features (8086
and plain BOOTP) make the code a bit confusing to trace.

I'm waiting for Ken to get OSKit network driver harness (which I believe
it's a main feature of the project) and then I'll try to offer my humble
help (it will be harder now when my holiday are finished, but I already
coded some .h files and have some ideas to implement the PXE API). I'm sure
Ken will post to the list when he releases new NILO versions.

I find PXE compliance a desirable feature since it may guarantee
compatibility with many products (and PXE's API suggests a modular structure
in the code making it easy to mantain and trace, something Etherboot lacks
now).

Best regards, Luis.