Etherboot Project

Web Page: http://etherboot.org/wiki/soc/ideas

Mailing List: http://etherboot.org/wiki/mailinglists

Etherboot Project creates Open Source software that allows computers to be booted over a network. This is useful in a variety of applications such as offices, schools, banks, supercomputer clusters, kiosks, and many other situations which benefit from centralized administration and maintainance of resources. gPXE is our widely-used, state-of-the-art network bootloader which combines PXE compatibility with features such as HTTP booting and SAN (e.g. iSCSI and AoE) booting.

Projects

• Device driver development The goal of the Project is to develop a new gPXE driver for the Broadcom 57xx(tg3) series of network cards. There currently already is a tg3 driver in gPXE but it is outdated and several years behind in development compared to the linux tg3 driver. This leads to many new tg3 cards not being supported in gPXE. The new driver is supposed to support all device variants the linux driver supports. If time permits we will look into additional drivers in need of porting/updating(atl1c comes to mind).
• IPv6 Implementation This project aims to clean up the existing IPv6 implementation in gPXE and continue implementing such features as autoconfiguration (via router advertisement and stateless autoconfiguration), DNS AAAA records, and DHCPv6. The project will also involve testing with several IPv6 network configurations in order to handle some of the unusual configurations that exist in the "real world".