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List:       openbios
Subject:    [OpenBIOS] Re: OpenFirmware and interrupt-map
From:       Stefan Reinauer <stepan () openbios ! org>
Date:       2004-02-05 15:38:19
Message-ID: 20040205153819.GE27598 () suse ! de
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* Peter Lister <prl@peterlister.co.uk> [040205 00:32]:
> Digressing slightly, please note that Etherboot is more than just the
> drivers - there is a significant amount of network code (now even TCP if
> one wants it), and it would benefit us all to share as much as possible;
> there is, for instance, an NFS client already.
 
I agree! Etherboots features are really nice.

> GRUB people now discuss "porting" Etherboot drivers, which is
> disappointing (have a look at the GRUB support forum and FAQ to see
> how little help there is on the network code compared to disk and fs).
> It would have made far more sense to co-operate on an open firmware
> network API, but hey ho... I'd like to see this happening fairly soon,
> so that any driver created for Etherboot immediately works with GRUB.
> So I encourage OpenBIOS to peacefully co-exist with GRUB and Etherboot
> rather than fork which is not a good way to encourage driver writers.

It was my initial goal when taking the grub filesystem drivers, to leave
them completely untouched. Unfortunately this is only possible when
staying with 32bit little endian architectures. So I started cleaning
these drivers up. When things are done, I'll try to feed them back into
grub, even though I doubt grub will ever make it to non-x86 hw.
Well.. there's still hope for PUPA (http://www.nongnu.org/pupa/) and
FILO ;-)
OpenBIOS' goal is to provide a useful and simple API to driver writers 
and still allow reusing as much code as possible. Therefore it should
coexist nicely with any other project ...

  Stefan

-- 
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