[syslinux] NILO PXE Help wanted

[Peter Lister]

> I need help about the stuff in nilo that gets burnt on a rom to make
> it a pxe bootrom. In etherboot, it's the file .rom and .lzrom etc.

> please help me indentify, what component in nilo is used with an
> eeprom writer to create a pxe bootrom from a 27c512 eprom.

It has not been written yet. Do you want to have a go?  It should be an
interesting project. This list is not strictly the right place for this
discussion; pxelinux is a *user* of PXE, not an implementation. However,
one of the major points of discussion is the proprietary firmware which
pxelinux uses - mainly its shortcomings - so it seems relevant to talk
about it here.

Ken Yap originated both NILO and Etherboot.

NILO is a PXE implementation based on OSkit; Ken no longer maintains it.
It is limited to the OSkit drivers and also (I think) only to booting
from floppy. It is not in widespread use as far as I know.

Etherboot is widely used and; it originally provided just open source
boot roms for nics. Ken actively maintains it and his work (along with
several others) means that Etherboot has expanded greatly and now has
support for several boot mechanisms - including as a PXE NBP. Etherboot
supports a fairly extensive library of small footprint polling network
card drivers (also used by GRUB), and all the features needed for a PXE
implementation (UDP, DHCP, TFTP) - other than the PXE API itself.

PXE isn't magic; it is just Intel's spec for a BIOS style binary
interface to network functions. We need a brave soul to port the PXE
interface in NILO from OSkit to Etherboot. Then we can have pxelinux (or
any other PXE NBP, such as NTLOADER) on top of open source firmware. The
most recent versions of Etherboot now have the higher level functions
(i.e. menus) separate from the network code, so it should be quite easy
to load PXE functionality as a "menu" module on top of the Etherboot
core.

PXELINUX and Etherboot might be seen as competing, but in fact the two
should coexist quite happily - PXELINUX can provide a syslinux like boot
loader on top of an Etherboot/NILO base, just as Etherboot can be used
to make PXE client firmware fit into an otherwise Etherboot environment.
There are other interesting open-source firmware projects on the go -
LinuxBIOS, FreeBIOS and Adam Sulmicki's PC BIOS work. The combination of
these will give us completely open firmware for commodity machines -
open source PXE on top of that would be wonderful.