Richard A. Smith wrote:
>>On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Richard A. Smith wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I have no idea if this exists anywhere since I never found anything.
>>>But something that would have been an godsend for me would have been
>>>some lowlevel code that initializes the PCMCIA sub-subsystem. 90% of
>>>my PIA over the last several months have been reworking the pcmcia
>>>sub-system so that I can use my wireless network card as a netboot
>>>device.
>>>
>>can you tell us what we should do?
>>
>
> I'd love to but I don't know.. *grin* Currently I have a linux
> kernel boot using a hacked up version of the init scripts and a
> subset of the PCMCIA, iwconfig, and busybox that is compiled with
> uClibc. That gets the size down to levels that fit in my flash.
>
> I guess what really needs to happen is someone needs to write low
> level init routines for pcmcia. Most of the pcmcia complexity is all
> the hot plug detection, finding the corresponding drivers, allocating
> resources and then loading them. All without gacking the system.
> But from an embedded system standpoint I don't need most of that. I
> am fine to hard code most of the settings.
>
> Currently what I have probally isn't much use to most people since I
> guess I'm one of the few people crazy enough to attempt wireless
> netboot. I searched all I could find of netboot projects and didn't
> find any reference to PCMCIA except in etherboot where they say it's
> not supported due to lack of lowlevel drivers.
You're not alone, we were just recently asked to develop a 802.11b card
that would be able to wireless netboot and wireless wake-on-lan a server
or cluster. Lack of PCMCIA support prompted us to look at a hardware
approach that would work around the software issues of the lack of low
level driver support. Wireless netboot looks simpler than wireless
wake-on-lan since the system is already powered up.
Bari
