From owner-freebsd-current  Wed Nov  3 10:24:53 1999
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Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 10:24:43 -0800 (PST)
From: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>
Message-Id: <199911031824.KAA60287@apollo.backplane.com>
To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: GENERIC build broken 
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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