[gPXE-devel] About !PXE and UNDI_LOADER

[Sean Shoufu Luo]

Micheal,

Many thanks for kind suggestion! I just work for our marketing guy,
regardless of bad or good. ^_^

Back to the question. I don't understand your comment 'You can do,
potentially'. From my understand, it is _*_not*__ standard to initialize
!PXE structure when UNDI loader called (as gPXE doesn't), but only if boot
from network. Am I right?

In other words, given a PXE ROM, it cannot be sure that !PXE will be
initialized when not boot from network, even if I call UNDI loader! As a
result, I cannot initialize PXE stack for UNDI API, if so, what can I do?



Thanks again,
Sean



On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 5:10 PM, Michael Brown <mbrown at fensystems.co.uk>wrote:

> On Thursday 24 Jun 2010 03:28:40 Sean Shoufu Luo wrote:
> >  Guys, I'm still struggling with UNDI driver for our OS. Problem again!
> > According to gPXE code, it seems, the !PXE structure is initialized only
> > when gPXE ROM started. So if boot from disk, there will no !PXE
> initialized
> > and loaded to memory. Right? If I boot from disk, is it possible for me
> to
> > use UNDI? Can I use UNDI_LOADER or other method to initialize !PXE
> > structure?
>
> You can do, potentially.  However, there's no guarantee that the UNDI
> loader
> will function correctly; some BIOSes will completely remove PXE ROMs when
> not
> network booting, and even if the ROM is present, there's a high chance that
> by
> the time your OS loads the UNDI loader will no longer work.
>
> Basically, you cannot sensibly use the PXE ROM as a substitute for writing
> network drivers for your OS.  It's just a bad idea.  If you really don't
> want
> to write your own drivers then write a shim layer to allow you to use
> something like Linux or BSD drivers instead.
>
> Michael
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://etherboot.org/pipermail/gpxe-devel/attachments/20100624/495c8dd8/attachment.html