Bug#217048: Please reconsider this bug

[John Pearson]

Hi,

Adam Lackorzynski has produced a patch for grub-0.97 which adds a 'PXE
driver' to the list of available network drivers.

With this patch, you can configure grub with
  ./configure --enable-diskless --enable-pxe

and get a pxegrub which requires no additional network drivers, and
works fine from any PXE-compliant ROM.  So the main difficulty, of
choosing which of many possibly conflicting network drivers to include,
is resolved.

His patch, and a README outlining what's required to use it, is at

  http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~adam/grub/0.97/

He recently added the ability to pass the configfile as a DHCP option
(as with the 'standard' PXEgrub), which had been the main shortcoming of
his patch until then.

Unfortunately his patch includes additional patches, some of which are
already incorporated into Debian's grub, so does not apply cleanly to
Debian sources 'as is'.  IMHO, it's a substantial improvement over the
existing options for netbooting (pxelinux, cherry-picking network
drivers for PXEgrub, etc.), and I hope you consider it worth the
effort.  I've looked into grub2 (admittedly, not in the last few weeks),
and it doesn't do this yet and doesn't yet appear stable or complete
enough for my liking.

Thanks,


John Pearson.

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