[gPXE-devel] About !PXE and UNDI_LOADER

[Glenn Brown]

Sean,

Upon reflection, I have to agree with Michael and Geoff: EFI is not, at 
this point, going to give you broad compatibility and stability.  The 
simple reason is that the network drivers are not broadly used: they are 
not even broadly used for booting, with most motherboards still using 
PXE for that.  EFI is also not going to give high performance or low 
overhead.

Also, note that while EFI does provide an SNP over UNDI driver, it is 
layered over UNDI-3.0, which is completely incompatible with legacy 
UNDI, as it is the UNDI interface redefined for 32/64-bit machines.

Considering your licensing requirements, it sounds like your best bet 
may be a shim to netBSD drivers, much as Michael Brown suggested, except 
without Linux/GPL drivers.  That way, you are just adopting their 
driver/kernel C interface, and providing C interfaces to support 
functions.  That's a lot more convenient that having to deal with 
software interrupt or EFI interfaces.

--Glenn