Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 10:24:43 -0800 (PST) From: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: GENERIC build broken Message-ID: <199911031824.KAA60287@apollo.backplane.com> References: <199911031800.KAA06333@dingo.cdrom.com>
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:I'm offended, and a little amused. You say "you aren't listening to
:what I'm saying", yet you have quoted a paragraph in which I say
:"... it doesn't require any buy-in from motherboard vendors."
:
:Are you calling me a liar, or stupid, or are you not reading what I'm
No, I'm just giving you the reality. Until I can buy *generic*
motherboards and/or ethernet cards that actually netboot, what
standards a few of them might use is moot. It would be phenominally
stupid for me to restrict my purchases to just those cards and/or
motherboards (since I tend to get MB's with built-in ethernets
these days) which are capable of netbooting, because I would wind
up paying a significant premium for the privilage.
The issue of the BIOS support is the same issue that you have with
floppy / HD / CDRom boot ordering. The BIOS needs to be aware of the
bootability of the network device in order for one to be able to
control the boot ordering. Just having a network adapter capable of
netbooting, or even a network adapter flash configuration that allows
you to turn it on and off, is not quite sufficient.
Think of CDRom booting. When just a few bios's were able to boot
from CDRom, nobody could depend on it and very few people were
shipping bootable cdroms. But once pretty much all the motherboards
started to be able to boot from an IDE CDRom, the issue went away
and now everyone I know boots their Linux, FreeBSD, etc... OS
distributions from CDRom and don't even bother with boot floppies
any more. CDRom booting also didn't eally come into its own until
the boot ordering could be controlled by the BIOSes. Early BIOSes
had only limited options for CDRom boot ordering vs floppy, SCSI, and
IDE drives, and that created problems.
We have exactly the same issues with netbooting that we had with CDRom
booting.
-Matt
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