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| ===== Frequently asked questions ===== | ===== Frequently asked questions ===== | ||
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| ==== How portable is Etherboot ? ==== | ==== How portable is Etherboot ? ==== | ||
| + | Work leading up to 5.2 made Etherboot much more portable. The platforms on which Etherboot runs, other than the x86, are the Itanium and the Hammer. The portability issues can be looked at in two categories: | ||
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| + | Support routines needed for platforms need to be written. Platform independent and dependent code have been separated and it should be straightforward to identify the support that is needed for running Etherboot on a new platform. | ||
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| + | Byte order, operand size and alignment issues in the core routines and PCI drivers have been mostly dealt with, although there are some known places where the code has not been made portable, e.g. longword access of registers in the eepro100 driver. We hope to find these bugs as time goes by. In some cases, e.g. ISA bus NICs, there is no need to fix the problem as the ISA bus only exists on the PC platform (unless somebody attaches a NE2000 to a big-endian microcontroller and plans to run Etherboot on it). | ||
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| + | Here are the low-level services that need to provided: writing and reading from the console, determining the size of memory, obtaining the an elapsed time, inserting a boot vector to be called, and a microsecond timer for short delays. Depending on the target environment, these services may be provided in different ways. | ||
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| ==== How can I get Etherboot to boot a Cardbus (PCMICA) or a USB NIC? ==== | ==== How can I get Etherboot to boot a Cardbus (PCMICA) or a USB NIC? ==== | ||
| + | Cardbus (PCMCIA) and USB NICs are interfaced to the CPU through their respective bus controllers. Before Etherboot can address the registers and memory on these NICs, it must initialise the bus controller appropriately. In Linux this is done by the PCMCIA and USB subsystems. In Etherboot, all this must be done by the code in the ROM. What needs to be written is a subsystem like the PCI subsystem in Etherboot. Volunteers are most welcome. | ||
| ===== Writing an EtherBoot Driver ===== | ===== Writing an EtherBoot Driver ===== | ||
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| ===== Appendix B. Compression algorithm, 1 July 1997 ===== | ===== Appendix B. Compression algorithm, 1 July 1997 ===== | ||
| ===== Appendix C. Copying conditions of the compression code, 1 July 1997 ===== | ===== Appendix C. Copying conditions of the compression code, 1 July 1997 ===== | ||
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