[syslinux] PXE UNDI Options in PXELINUX

[Peter Lister]

> I wonder, if you know any more about the possibilities of having a
> standard Network driver for most cards. Is there any such thing for
> linux? Where do I get it? Is there possibly something for DOS? A UNDI
> Packetdriver would be cool, because then I could use DosSCP on every
> Network card I would ever be using with MemDisk (which in turn is very
> cool.)

Reliable and fixable open source PXE firmware would be very useful.

> Christian (thinking about writing own PXE/UNDI Packetdriver)

Don't think about writing a driver! There are several families of
drivers in existance. Etherboot has its own driver library (now also
used by GRUB); there are also DOS drivers (e.g. Crynwr drivers) used by
netboot and OSkit.

The Cool Stuff is a layer on top of such a driver to provide UNDI to
clients such as pxelinux, and here too code exists. NILO is a PXE
implementation which uses OSkit drivers, but the project seems dormant
and only really works from floppy as far as I know. Someone recently
added skeleton PXE functionality to Etherboot (to support FreeBSD).

So what the world needs is glue to join these things together and
someone with the patience to test and bugfix it. :) If you are
volunteering, my suggestion is to start off by extending the PXE
functionality in etherboot to do UNDI properly. That will cover a wide
selection of nics in one go, certainly enough to get a useful number of
people interested. The rest of PXE should not be hard, since Etherboot
already has DHCP and TFTP implmentations; NILO should be helpful.

If the above has not put you off, I suggest you discuss this on
etherboot-developers. There is active discussion related to this area,
and Ken Yap who originated NILO is the Etherboot maintainer.