Re: Feature request: network devices

[Seth Goldberg]

Quoting Bean, who wrote the following on Wed, 11 Nov 2009:

> On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 12:32 PM, Seth Goldberg <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> >  Enhancing the TFTP & PXE boot capabilities of GRUB2 is extremely important
> > to our use of GRUB2, so if you're interested in doing this work, please let
> > me know so we can coordinate our efforts.
>
> Hi,
>
> Isn't TFTP and PXE boot support in GRUB2 ready ?

  Very basic support is.  We (Sun) added a number of other things to Legacy 
GRUB (i.e. the ability to select a configuration file based on information in 
the DHCP ACK without requiring the downloading of a base grub configuration 
file -- for the simplicity and consistency of our user base, that's what I 
need from GRUB2.  Requiring the users to have a grub.cfg with a bunch of if 
statements is a non-starter, so I'm "backporting" the grub configuration file 
specialization logic to GRUB2.).  We also pass the entire DHCP ACK via a 
non-compliant method in the multiboot structure -- Vladimir suggested he'd be 
cool with extended the multiboot spec to allow that explicitly.  It prevents 
the kernel from having to restart DHCP (and for it to know from which 
interface it was booted).  I need to check again, but i don't know if GRUB's 
TFTP functionality supports different TFTP block sizes (which is important for 
us, because the boot archive we load can be quite large and can overflow the 
TFTP packet counter -- I'm not sure if GRUB2 deals with wraparound of that 
counter either).  So, to sum up, there are a number of things we need that 
don't exist right now.  And, as was mentioned, there's EFI support, which is 
also essential.  PXE under EFI exists appears to be as widespread as PXE on 
BIOS (modulo Apple hardware, as usual).

 --S