Etherboot and Netboot support for Realtek NE2000 PCI clones (8029 and 8139)

[Mike Hammer <mike-hammer@usa.net>]

Hello,

While back when i was trying to make etherboot-3.2 work along with
Netboot i was dealing with Realtek's 8029 NE2000 PCI cline chip.

Fortunately the generic NE2000 PCI chip support from etherboot-3.2
worked great and as for Netboot since Realtek already had a packet
driver for their 8029 chip, Netboot also worked great with this chip.

Lately i've been seeing some posting on this site regarding support
for 8139 chip from Realtek which is their FastEthernet supporting upto
100Mbps link speed.  Now i've come across situation where i now need
to get Etherboot and Netboot to work with 8139 chip.

I was wondering the following:

+ Doesn't the register programming backward compatible with 8029 and
  if so shouldn't Etherboot (3.2 or latest version) support 8139
  chip?  Maybe not in 100Mbps link speed but at least as 10Mbps.

+ It seems the packet driver binary size of 8139 is huge, ~56KB.
  Doesn't Netboot 0.8.1 support larger packet driver size?  Also i
  understand that the Netboot PROM code/data is all compressed prior
  to burning into the PROM.  Maybe even with the compression ratio
  that Netboot provides, the size of 8139 packet driver just won't
  fit into say 32KB of PROM space.

Has anyone make success with 8139 with Etherboot and/or Netboot?

I'll be trying out this task right about now.

Thank you very much,

-mh



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