New netboot version

[gero@gkminix.han.de (Gero Kuhlmann)]

Hello,

today I released the new version 0.7 of netboot. You will find the
following changes:

-  some bugs in the bootrom have been fixed
-  the bootrom loader has been changed so that the decompression now runs
   equally fast no matter if you use shadow ram for the bootrom or not
-  MGL

Since I was not able yet to contact sunsite, you can only get this new
version from the netboot home page yet: http://www.han.de/~gero/netboot.
I will upload it to sunsite as soon as possible.

MGL: What is that?
While playing around with lex and yacc I found that it would be nice to
have a simpler method to define boot menus than with the bootrom tags, so
I initially designed a language called Menu Generation Language (MGL). In
order to create a boot menu you write a small program in MGL and run it
through mknbi-mgl, which then produces a boot image file, which can be
directly loaded by the bootrom via tftp. MGL allows you to tell the bootrom
to load another boot image file from a given server. Note that this only
works with the bootrom contained in this actual version. Version 0.6.x of
netboot already supports basic MGL operation, but does no allow loading a
different boot image file (aka operating system) once the MGL program started.
It is also likely that it will not work with etherboot.
With time MGL finally developed into a simple Pascal like compiler. So you
can not only use the basic features for defining a menu, but even write
more elaborate programs, like letting the user enter different passwords,
print nice text somewhere on the screen etc. There are even functions for
accessing the BOOTP record, and changing it for the next bootrom load.
There are still some features of standard-Pascal missing, but those are IMHO
the less important ones.
Note that this compiler has not been tested extensively. Please test it
if you can, and let me know if something doesn't work as expected. When
it stabilizes in the future, I will probably remove the old method of
defining menus from the standard bootrom kernel. But at present, it is
still very alpha. Therefore, I have not included MGL into any of the
official documentation yet. Please consult the man page and test programs
to see how it works.

gero.

-- 
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
  - Albert Camus
--
Gero Kuhlmann, Hannover     0511/6497525 (Voice)        gero@gkminix.han.de