[gPXE] interrupt and serial

[Luca]

Hi all,
 I wanted to pass some parameters to gPXE, when it starts. As I do not want
to rebuild the gPXE image every time with a new script I thought of using
the serial for that.

So I modified the gPXE serial code. Now when gPXE starts, it talks over the
serial with a serial server and gets the parameters I need to pass to gPXE.
Unfortunately this almost works :(

The reason is that in GPXE I can't use interrupts, so I keep polling the
serial for new data. Because of the polling, my gPXE serial code sometimes
looses some characters sent from the serial server (it is not fast enough to
read all characters sent by the server).
I think it isn't possible to use interrupt in gPXE, am I wrong?

So I started looking for a different solution. I read about the possibilty
of using external auxiliary programs with gPXE. Now what I'm going to say
might be really but really stupid (sorry).

What about if I create a small embedded linux which can use the serial to
talk to the serial server and gets the parameters it needs and then pass
those back to gPXE?
In other words, gPXE starts and loads an external program (my embedded
linux), which returns to gPXE after talking with the serial server? Would
that be possible?

Thank you,
 Luca
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