Re: Etherboot and gpxe
Joyce Yu <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.network.etherboot.user |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On 08/05/09 11:15, Marty Connor wrote: > "working" is a relative term. The native gPXE interface is better > because it allow multiple NICs of the same type to be used and because > it offers _much_ better performance, among other things. > > Is there some particular reason you would want to use the legacy > interface support in gPXE? If it is because you don't want to do the > work to convert to the new API you could probably find someone to help > with that. It's not really that hard, especially if you already have > a working Etherboot-style driver. > > We would oppose including a legacy interface driver in gPXE without a > _really_ good reason. If you have one, please let us know. I spent sometime to look at the new gPXE API. I think it takes a few days to port and debug a driver. But I am looking for a few other things before I do the actually porting work. So I did a quick porting using the legacy etherboot interfaces. What I found is the gPXE ROM image size is too large. In the etherboot environment, I was able to control the image size to be 32k by changing 'makerom.pl' to 'makerom.pl -s 0', and make bin/xxxx.zrom. In the gPXE environment, the ROM image size of the same driver is 64k which cause the option overflow in my system. I can see that my xxxx.o in gPXE (quick port using legacy interfaces) is five times larger than my xxxx.o in the etherboot. I also have a question regarding the usages of the iobuf in the TX in gPXE. If the packet in the iobuf was copied to a pre-allocated buffer and sent to the HW to be kicked to the wire, iobuf can be set to NULL to be re-used by the stack after the kick, and there is no need to look at the TX completion in the xxx_poll(), right? Thanks, Joyce Thanks, Joyce -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july