[gPXE-devel] [PATCH][forcedeth] Replace forcedeth driver with native gPXE driver

[Faur Andrei]

On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 5:19 PM, Andrei Faur <da3drus at gmail.com> wrote:
> This patch adds a native gPXE forcedeth driver and removes the legacy
> Etherboot forcedeth driver. It supports 40 different chips, compared
> to the original 14.
>
> 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: 13/12/12/12/12
> seconds; booting DSL using pxelinux also succeeded. The driver has also
> been tested by chaining undionly.kpxe and it worked. It is approx ~1s
> slower on average than the legacy driver because of additional code
> to check for link state and because the legacy driver did not wait for
> packets to finish sending making it faster than it should have been.
>
> Signed-off-by: Andrei Faur <da3drus at gmail.com>
> ---
> v1 (improvements over RFC version):
>  * implemented link state checking
>  * solved MAC address issue by running in promiscuous mode and
>  preforming manual frame filtering. This way, we can avoid writing
>  the correct MAC address back to the NIC since it was only required
>  for the NIC's built-in filtering.

Testing and comments would be appreciated. You can easily create
images using the following ROM-o-matic:

http://etherboot.org/share/stefanha/forcedeth/contrib/rom-o-matic/

If you want to build from sources, you can clone the branch using:

$ git clone -b forcedeth_tmp git://git.etherboot.org/scm/people/andreif/gpxe.git

--
Andrei Faur