[gPXE-devel] About !PXE and UNDI_LOADER

[Sean Shoufu Luo]

Michael, thanks for your patience and kind word to give so much helpful
information. Although I should turn to other way and give it up, it's indeed
helpful for me to understand deeply about UNDI.

Thank you again!
Sean

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 9:28 PM, Michael Brown <mbrown at fensystems.co.uk>wrote:

> 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
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://etherboot.org/pipermail/gpxe-devel/attachments/20100625/e8b305df/attachment.html