Welcome to the

EtherBoot Project
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Note that the appearance of a task on this list does not imply that it will be done. In fact, some of the tasks I have no interest in myself, but have noted here because I recognise the deficiency. Therefore things will happen sooner if people chip in and help. Volunteers for any the tasks below are most welcome.

Hardware support

  • Try porting Etherboot to more platforms, e.g. microcontrollers.
  • Drivers, drivers, more drivers
  • Make drivers take a standardised set of defines to control the level of debug output. (in progress by Timothy Legge)
  • Multicast support for NIC drivers. (mostly done by Timothy Legge)
  • Portability issues in NIC drivers, e.g. longword access of registers in the eepro100 driver on big-endian CPUs.
  • A config/menuconfig/xconfig Linux kernel style configuration setup for Etherboot.
  • Cardbus (PCMCIA) and USB subsystems to interface with NICs connected to these buses
  • Add more entries into hardware compatibility database
  • Check out SYSLINUX A20 handling to see if there's anything we could do better
  • NE2000 bus width detection method is not as reliable as could be (are there any 8-bit buses anymore?)
  • Figure out a way for the code to work out which physical NIC itīs plugged into. This is so that on a machine with 2 or more NICs of the same model, Etherboot activates only the NIC the ROM is installed on (principle of least surprise). Etherboot already knows the ROM start address. Some NICs contain in their configuration registers the ROM start address.

BIOS issues

  • Collect information about compatibility with various BIOSes
  • Open Source tools to manipulate flash ROM images

Software

  • Alternatively, on the server side, how about a smart TFTP daemon that tags images on the fly?
  • A TFTP to HTTP gateway. (beta release by Ken Yap)
  • Support SNMP for error reporting for consoleless clients

mknbi

  • Get LUA menuing working.
  • Deprecate NBI, implement mkelf-{dos,fdos,rom} (in progress by Ken Yap).

Documentation

  • Add more developer documentation. (revised in 5.2, but can always do better)
  • Translations to other languages.
 
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