Re: Etherboot and gpxe

Michael,

I built the rtl8129.rom which I think is the smallest driver among the 
gPXE NIC drivers. The image size is:
$ ls -l bin/rtl8129.rom
-rw-r--r--  1 joyce wheel 55808 Aug  8  2009 bin/rtl8129.rom

55k is still quite large that causes option rom overflow in the systems 
that I am working on. In the etherboot, there is an option to build 
xxx.zrom image which is almost half size of the the xxx.rom image. I 
couldn't find the same option in the gPXE. I don't know much about gPXE. 
Can you suggest some ways to shrink the image? Where can I find the 
details to strip out features in gPXE?

Thanks,
Joyce

On 08/08/09 17:45, Michael Brown wrote:
> 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
>   


--

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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

_______________________________________________
Etherboot-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/etherboot-discuss