Re: Etherboot and gpxe

On Friday 07 August 2009 00:02:10 Joshua Oreman wrote:
> The gPXE driver size is only a tiny bit more (500 bytes). That's a
> *mighty* large driver, though. There are only two in the gPXE tree that
> are larger in .text (tg3 and e1000). For comparison, rtl8139 is 3097
> bytes. It's going to be pretty difficult to make a 32kb ROM, even
> compressed, when your driver is 20kb.

Seconded.

You need to write a much more efficient driver, or just pay someone to do it 
for you.  (I'm sure Sun can afford the few thousand dollars it costs to get a 
gPXE driver developed, and the expected timescale is measured in weeks.)

You can strip out features to compensate for an excessively large driver, but 
you're likely to find that users actually *want* PXE compatibility, iSCSI 
boot, etc.

Michael

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