Re: New directions for the Etherboot project

On Sun, May 01, 2005 at 11:06:11PM -0400, Marty Connor wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
> 
> __Growth and Expandability__
> Etherboot has grown lot, and is constantly gaining capabilities.  This 
> is a good thing, but after a while a single program can attempt to do 
> too much, and become difficult to maintain and use.
> 
   [ modular ]

human / organ / tissue / cell

even we have smaller parts



  [ announce of  gPXE ]

> I think we can do this, and more importantly, I think we _should_ do 
> this.
> 
> What do you think?

PXE is a poor documented mixture of BIOS and network boot code.
It is for i80?86 processors, but that architecture is dying.

Etherboot is stand alone network boot code.
It supports several processors.


I do like the "cell approach" and don't like "the PXE mantra".
But hey, I don't have to work on the DHCP / TFTP mutant called PXE.
And that is only the network part.

At this mailinglist was recently a posting which reported
some software misses stuff in EtherBoot that is available in properiaty
PXE. So now we, the EtherBoot project, have a "customer" that wants us
to find out what BIOS function that software needs.
The only reason: "It works with other PXE clients"

Please remember that EtherBoot is about networkboot.
( not a  80286 BIOS repair kit )



Okay, so far my rant.



The move from monolithic to modular is good.

What I think that is needed for that,
is an overhaul of the build system.


> Marty


Geert

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