Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>Eric Van Hensbergen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>>We actually have two console over ethernet systems that we are playinga round
>>with. One operates completely over raw ethernet using broadcast and a special
>>Frame ID which is discarded by systems that don't care. We then run a modified
>>syslog catcher which prepends the MAC Address of the sender to the message. You
>>
>>can then use typical Syslog filter mechanisms to get rid of what you don't want
>>to see. You can also do MAC->IP->Hostname translation.
>>
>
>Is there a reason for not using for a multicast destination mac address,
>instead of broadcast?
>
No reason in particular - it was intended to be a "quick hack" - our
evaluation platform has neither keyboard, nor monitor, nor serial
port..so we just needed something easier than snooping memory with an
American Arium ICE (which wasn't very tractable for multiple systems).
In principal you could hardcode the destination, or include it in the
DHCP. That would allow you to use broadcast, multi-cast or
point-to-point. In practice though, the amount of network traffic
generated by the console is truly trivial.
I'll make sure I clean up the raw-ethernet console stuff in
LinuxBIOS...right now its bundled in with the embedded etherboot code.
Thinking more on it, it might also be usefull to put this stuff in the
Etherboot package in general, although using the embedded LinuxBIOS
etherboot code allows some hacks to get console before you actually
start the etherboot process (fundamentally you can start it up as soon
as memory and PCI initialize).
-eric
