Re: NI6510: LANCE time out on transmit

[OKUJI Yoshinori <okuji@kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp>]

From: Klaus Espenlaub <espenlaub@informatik.uni-ulm.de>
Subject: Re: NI6510: LANCE time out on transmit
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 10:11:35 +0200

> 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.

  Things have changed very much, but GRUB still needs a sepatate
configuration file for GRUB-specific stuff (of course, GRUB can do
everything even if there is no configuration file, though). That
perhaps shows the different goals between GRUB and Etherboot. Our goal
is mostly for flexibility, extensibility and powerfulness. So I
sometimes have to make a sacrifice of convenience or simplicity. This
will be dramatically changed in the future, but now is not the time...

> Which is where I stole it :)

  Oh, I guessed that, since they were very similar. They say that a
great programmer steals source code. ;)

> 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.

  That sounds very reasonable to me. I'll follow Etherboot once I have
spare time. (I'm now overworking because of too many patches.)

> 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.

  Thanks for your suggestion. IMO, it is not a Etherboot's fault to
omit the "readahead" feature. That's a good tradeoff. Anyway, how long
it takes to download an OS image is not so significant unless you
very often reboot a machine.

Regards,
Okuji
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