interesting request for serial console over enet

[ron minnich]

someone I know from a Big telecom company just pushed an interesting
idea on me.

If coreboot+seabios would provide a bios service for serial console
over enet, it would improve their life a lot. They could stop building
cyclades boxes into their racks, and stop worrying about which
mainboards had serial ports. I know that coreboot can now do console
over enet; would be neat if seabios could provide a path for payloads
to use it.

Note they don't want vga over enet or IPMI. Just a very simple "until
we're  booted" console over enet that looks like serial port. Sort of
a bios-level version of this: http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/8/cec

Just thought I'd mention it ...

ron

[Peter Stuge]

ron minnich wrote:
> I know that coreboot can now do console over enet; would be neat if
> seabios could provide a path for payloads to use it.

There's a problem; not very many ethernet adapters besides the old
RealTek 8029 (NE2000 PCI clone) have on-chip SRAM reachable via PIO.
:\

//Peter

[Rudolf Marek]

Dne 5.11.2010 00:54, ron minnich napsal(a):
> someone I know from a Big telecom company just pushed an interesting
> idea on me.
>
> If coreboot+seabios would provide a bios service for serial console
> over enet, it would improve their life a lot. They could stop building
> cyclades boxes into their racks, and stop worrying about which
> mainboards had serial ports. I know that coreboot can now do console
> over enet; would be neat if seabios could provide a path for payloads
> to use it.

What about to write add-on to gPXE? Some simple handler for int10/int16 call 
sitting on it would certainly help (it can do DHCP/BOOT to get idea about GW)

I think they must have ARP there too. So the only part which is really  missing
is just the handler for the BIOS.

I think the current coreboot ethernet console has some issues if it is not on 
bus0. I guess I could change that a bit to provide ramstage support if this is 
the case.

Thanks,
Rudolf