[gPXE-devel] what is undi.zrom in gPXE?

[Alessandro Salvatori]

would it somehow be possible to burn the gpxe undi rom onto a separate
extension rom and have that undi rom rely on the driver from the nic
rom that would still be present and untouched?

thanks!
-A

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 08:55, Joshua Oreman <oremanj at rwcr.net> wrote:
> [Please keep the list in the Cc]
>
> On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 5:37 AM, Sean Shoufu Luo <luoshoufu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Josh,
>> Thank you for informative explain on UNDI. I still have a question.
>> According to what you said, my understand is UNDI build (undi.zrom) contains
>> DHCP/TFTP/... and UNDI driver, and it must work with vendor ROM that exposes
>> an UNDI. My question is who provides the UNDI ROM which is loaded to be
>> below 1M memory, undi.zrom or vendor ROM?
>
> So, there are two components here:
>
> - The UNDI interface
> - The UNDI driver
>
> (Sadly, as far as I know these don't have a consistent naming.) The
> UNDI interface is provided by an existing vendor PXE ROM or
> specific-driver Etherboot or gPXE ROM (e.g. rtl8139.zrom). It has a
> special header so it can be found and loaded in such a way that it
> will just expose the UNDI API. The UNDI driver (in undi.zrom and
> friends) looks for a ROM that implements the UNDI interface, loads it,
> and sends and receives DHCP/TFTP/etc packets using the UNDI API that
> it finds. As I said before, *undi.zrom does not make sense and will
> never work*; the UNDI driver should be part of a PXE or CDROM or
> [etc.] build of Etherboot/gPXE with a *different*, driver-specific ROM
> already present in the system.
>
> The main use of UNDI is to allow booting on systems that
> Etherboot/gPXE does not have native driver support for. For it to
> work, you need to still have the vendor PXE ROM in the system.
>
> -- Josh
>
>> Thanks again
>> -Sean-
>> On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 10:59 AM, <oremanj at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Sean,
>>>
>>> A few things:
>>>
>>> Etherboot is out of date and in maintenance mode only. Please use gPXE if
>>> you can, as it has many more features and fewer bugs. :-) If there's a
>>> specific reason you need to use Etherboot over gPXE, let us know; we'd like
>>> to fix it.
>>>
>>> UNDI builds of Etherboot and gPXE are meant to be used in tandem with a
>>> preexisting vendor ROM that exposes an UNDI interface. Thus, the combination
>>> UNDI + ROM in the same build makes no sense. Etherboot and gPXE expose an
>>> UNDI interface no matter what, and in this case Etherboot finds and attempts
>>> to load *itself* as the underlying "real" vendor ROM. The results are
>>> predictably awful.
>>>
>>> So what you really want is a ROM with a specific driver included (not
>>> UNDI). Also, consider using gPXE instead of Etherboot.
>>>
>>> Happy hacking :-)
>>>
>>> -- Josh
>>> Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Sean Shoufu Luo <luoshoufu at gmail.com>
>>> Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:48:36
>>> To: <gpxe-devel at etherboot.org>
>>> Subject: [gPXE-devel] what is undi.zrom in gPXE?
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> gPXE-devel mailing list
>>> gPXE-devel at etherboot.org
>>> http://etherboot.org/mailman/listinfo/gpxe-devel
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Face to sun
>>
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