[gPXE-devel] About !PXE and UNDI_LOADER

[Michael Brown]

On Thursday 24 Jun 2010 11:52:35 Sean Shoufu Luo wrote:
> Many thanks for kind suggestion! I just work for our marketing guy,
> regardless of bad or good. ^_^

Unfortunately your marketing guy is asking you to do something that is 
technically impossible.  He may as well ask you to create a perpetual motion 
machine.  You cannot succeed.

> 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?

The UNDI loader is the component that initialises the !PXE structure.  It is 
called implicitly from the ROM's BEV when booting from the network.

> 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?

If you could call the UNDI loader then that would create the !PXE structure, 
which you could then use.  What I am trying to explain to you is that there 
exist large numbers of machines in which you simply will not be able to call 
the UNDI loader.  Your approach cannot work as a general solution.

You are wasting your time and resources by following this path.  Stop now.  If 
you need advice on how to create a shim layer to allow you to use Linux (or 
BSD, or gPXE, etc.) drivers, feel free to contact me off-list.

Michael