[gPXE-devel] [RFC PATCH][forcedeth] Replace forcedeth driver

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 7:23 PM, Andrei Faur <da3drus at gmail.com> wrote:
> This patch replaces the old forcedeth driver with a new one
> that uses gPXE's API and supports more chips.
>
> It has been tested on a NIC with an CK804 Ethernet Controller,
> and the results of downloading 5 100mb images in a row have
> been: 12/11/11/11/11 seconds; booting DSL using pxelinux also
> succeeded. The driver has also been tested by chaining
> undionly.kpxe and it worked.
>
> The purpose of this patch is to get feedback on any issues
> you might encounter when using the new driver. Also, any
> comments related to the code are more than welcome.
>
> Current TODOs:
> * link state
> * MAC address issue when SAN booting. Some NICs have a bug
> where the MAC address is written in reverse order into the
> serial EEPROM. This is fixed in .probe and reverted in .close.
> Since SAN booting doesn't call .close, a Linux driver might
> end up using the reversed MAC. Any suggestions on how to
> solve this are welcome.

This code sets promiscuous mode so the MAC address shouldn't matter.
Normally the NIC would do MAC filtering for broadcast, multicast, and
this device's MAC.  If promiscuous mode is used, the code only needs
to read the MAC address from the card.  It should never write it back.
 That way gPXE cannot jumble up the MAC.  Does this sound like it will
work?

Stefan