[coreboot] Fwd: gPXE on Coreboot

[ron minnich]

Some possible gPXE work, including modifying gPXE to not require any
BIOS support, as we used to have for etherboot.

ron

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michael Brown <mbrown at fensystems.co.uk>
Date: Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 11:36 AM
Subject: Re: gPXE on Coreboot
To: Marty Connor <mdc at etherboot.org>
Cc: Ron Minnich <rminnich at gmail.com>


On Friday 17 April 2009 17:47:48 Marty Connor wrote:
> I was talking to Michael Brown, lead developer for gPXE, and he said
> that with the work we have done to support EFI, it would now be easier
> to support gPXE on Coreboot.

Specifically, we isolated all the firmware-specific code so that nothing
relies on the assumption of having a PC BIOS present, and tidied up the x86
inline assembly so that it will work when compiled for a 64-bit CPU.
Building an EFI image is now just a case of running a slightly different make
command, e.g.

 make bin/rtl8139.rom
 make bin-efi/rtl8139.efirom
 make bin-x86_64-efi/rtl8139.efirom # requires gcc4.4

When I did the EFI work, I was specifically envisioning that we might extend
it to support other firmware environments such as coreboot, so the API
infrastructure is already in place.  We have working reference code for
LinuxBIOS in older versions of Etherboot.  Putting the two together should
not be a huge technical challenge, and would open up e.g. HTTP booting to
coreboot users.

> I wanted to get the two of you talking to see if this was potentially a
> fundable project.  I think the Coreboot -> SEABios -> gPXE area is of
> more wide-scale interest, but if we could get gPXE running on Coreboot,
> I'm sure there is a customer base that would be very happy.

Marty mentioned that you might be able to secure funding for this type of
project.  If this is possible, then I would definitely be interested in
working on it.

Michael