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>A potted history of Etherboot</TITLE
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>A potted history of Etherboot</H1
><P
> In Linux circles Netboot appeared first. According to the docs Jamie
Honan was the person who coded up the first version and specified the
format of the tagged image files. This version used assembler code taken
from <A
HREF="http://www.crynwr.com"
TARGET="_top"
>packet drivers</A
> to
interface to the hardware, only Western Digital (now SMC) NICs in the
first instance. It also required a DOS environment to compile. Later on
Gero Kuhlmann took over the development of Netboot and made tremendous
improvements to it. Among other things he created a harness that would
simulate just enough of a DOS environment so that unmodified packet
driver binaries could be used in a boot ROM. This allows any NIC on the
market that has a packet driver to be used immediately. He also migrated
the development to a Linux (Unix) platform.
</P
><P
> Etherboot was ported from FreeBSD by Markus Gutschke. He made it compile
under Linux and added code to support tagged images in addition to NFS
boot. Since tagged images are a more general mechanism and requires less
boot rom code, this has become the preferred loading method. Markus has
also coded most of the additional features between 2.0 and 3.0, such as
additional bootp tags, ANSI screen escapes, etc. Many of the features
common to Etherboot and Netboot, such as the tagged image format, the
support programs such as mknbi, and support in the Linux kernel for
diskless booting, are by Gero or Markus.
</P
><P
> <A
HREF="http://www.geocities.com/ken_yap_aus/"
TARGET="_top"
>Ken Yap</A
> came
to Etherboot a bit later. His original objective was to produce a 16 bit
version that could be used to netboot ELKS and other OSes on older CPUs.
As these things happen, he got enticed into improving the code, doing
structural rearrangement, and merging contributions from others, and is
now the primary maintainer of Etherboot.
</P
><P
> In the early days, the Etherboot web page was hosted by the <A
HREF="http://www.slug.org.au/"
TARGET="_top"
>Sydney Linux Users Group</A
> web site.
Quite coincidentally and unrelatedly, Jamie Honan is one of the founding
members of SLUG, so the story has come a full circle here. Since April
2000, Etherboot has been hosted at <A
HREF="http://sourceforge.net/"
TARGET="_top"
>Sourceforge</A
>. Sourceforge has
provided superb facilities for hosting community Open Source
development.
</P
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