[syslinux] [Etherboot-developers] [PATCH] Activating FTP for gpxe on Syslinux 3.72-pre1

[Marty Connor]

Michael Brown wrote:
> On Wednesday 03 September 2008 17:21:08 H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>>> Could we just activate FTP on gpxe ?
>>> I did a trivial patch for enabling it on top of 3.72-pre1.
>> I would prefer if the upstream default was changed, too, but I'm not
>> adverse to changing it if the upstream doesn't want to.
> 
> I don't have a strong feeling either way; I had assumed that nowadays ftp was 
> something of a niche protocol, so left it disabled by default to save space.  
> I could be convinced otherwise.

I'm somewhat concerned about increasing .rom image size if we turn on 
more protocols, since this would (I believe) affect all image types.

Perhaps this downstream protocol default is something that should be in 
src/config-local.h in the syslinux/gpxelinux tree, which would allow it 
to be included without making it a default (config-local.h is not part 
of the git checkout).

Adding ftp protocol seems to add around 1K to the code size. ( size 
bin/ftp.o ).  It's not that much, and as our .rom images are >32K, it 
may be that it is not a problem since a system would need to be able to 
deal with 64K images anyway.

We should take a look at our defaults in src/config.h to see what our 
default build choices are doing.

I note that comboot support is on by default now in the latest build, 
and rtl8139 rom size just hit 50K:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 mdc mdc 50688 Sep  3 23:09 bin/rtl8139.rom

This concerns me (as awesome as comboot support is), since rtl8139 is a 
small driver, and larger drivers will almost certainly overflow 64K 
flash EEPROMs.

Marty