Re: NI6510: LANCE time out on transmit

[Klaus Espenlaub <espenlaub@informatik.uni-ulm.de>]

OKUJI Yoshinori wrote:
> 
> From: Klaus Espenlaub <espenlaub@informatik.uni-ulm.de>
> Subject: Re: NI6510: LANCE time out on transmit
> Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 12:50:24 +0200
> 
> > Oh - as a user of GRUB you might be also interested that Etherboot
> > not supports
> > rudimentary Multiboot loading, too.
> 
>   What do you mean by the word "rudimentary"?

It means that it will directly load ELF Multiboot kernels (no mknbi-* required)
and provides them with memory and command line information.  That's it.  No
Multiboot header checking, no a.out support, no modules, no symbol table loading.
Maybe I can talk one of my students into writing symbol table loading.

GRUB is "slightly" better in this respect, but I don't need all that fancy
stuff - and I like it very much that Etherboot loads its complete configuration
off the DHCP server.  This is something that didn't apply to the GRUB versions
I played with (pre GNU GRUB age).  Might have changed since then.

>   As the maintainer of GRUB, I must say that the reason why GRUB
> doesn't support NFS for now is just that nobody requests the
> feature. Adding it into GRUB would be very easy, since Etherboot has
> already the code as well as OSKit's netboot. Just steal it. :)

Which is where I stole it :)
The reason why NFS is in Etherboot is because I thought it would be cool.  Not
because anyone nagged me to write it.  All machines I needed to be boot servers
already had NFS set up, but not TFTP.  It also makes maintenance easier for me,
as I can mount/update the directory with the boot files on any decent machine.

GRUB could probably steal the original code pretty much unmodified, which was not
an option for Etherboot because of the 32K size constraint.  The readahead code
could be left in - it speeds up the NFS download, but was impossible to keep
for Etherboot because there is no room in the spec for large buffers.
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