[syslinux] nilo -> tftp-hpa interaction

[H. Peter Anvin]

Peter Lister wrote:

> 
> I would love PXE on top of Etherboot so that 'doze (NTLOADER or
> whatever) can be PXEd by those who want it, but Linux or other open
> source is loaded directly. These would ideally all be dynamically
> loadable; PXE can load Etherboot, so why can't Etherboot load NILO?
> Conversely, static build is also good; pxelinux could sit directly on
> top of Etherboot - no mucking around actually loading it as a PXE NBP.
> 
> More generally, there's lots of good code out there, and I'd really like
> all those involved in Etherboot, LinuxBIOS, NILO, GRUB, OpenBIOS and so
> on to regard themselves as complementary parts of a single greater open
> source firmware project so that those of using it can put it together in
> interesting ways with (or instead of) the commercial offerings.
> 


This is exactly the problem I have with a lot of things.

I believe in keeping the number of firmware standards small.

PXE is ugly as hell, and it's pretty clear it was designed by completely
unqualified people, but ugly or not, that's what's there.  I don't believe
in being gratuitiously different just to save a second or two of boot time.

What I'd like to see is a clean, open source, PXE implementation that
users can flash into their ROMs if they don't have PXE already, or their
PXE implementation is broken.  If they then layer PXELINUX or whatever on
top of it, that's a completely different issue.

	-hpa