On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, Andrew Gillham wrote:

> Perhaps it would be fine to call the TFTP implementation instead of using
> the NetBSD implementation.

KISS :-)

> > Our goals might be different - I'd be happy if where able to kickstart a
> > kernel with help from PXE. A UNDI driver is "nice to have" but I do not
> > think it would be widely used because of performance limitations in !PXE
> > (One UDP connection at a time etc.)
> 
> Why be limited to using TFTP to retrieve a kernel?  NetBSD's netboot is
> capable of pulling the kernel from an NFS mount, using rarpd/bootparam, etc.
> Sure it should be possible to do everything via DHCP, but I definitely
> want to load my kernels via NFS, so I don't have to stuff the right
> kernel into /tftpboot on the server.
>
> IMHO it makes more sense to just replace the lowlevel chipset specific 
> code in netboot with a driver for the PXE interface.  Then we have a
> fairly normal netboot that loads and "kickstarts" a normal kernel via
> the established methods.  Once the kernel takes over then the PXE stuff
> is gone.

That would be nice but I think it is more trouble than one would have
guessed. If you keep it TFTP you hardly need to write any code as
everything else is providede by PXE. If you however want to use NFS you
would need a lot more coding. I don't even know if it is possible to do it
because of the limitations in PXE:
1) UNDI only gives you UDP (No TCP)
2) UNDI only allows one active UDP connection at a time.

I do not know whether this would be a problem when using NFS over UNDI?

Kind Regards,
Claus Andersen