Google Summer of Code project Implementing HTTP support for libsa

Zoltan Arnold NAGY has been busy coding away on his project to add support for booting over HTTP to libsa. Early on in his work he found that the current libsa PXE support used the UDP support functions in the PXE ROM which is unsuitable for HTTP as this requires a TCP transport. Zoltan has written a net_if driver for libsa that uses the PXE UNDI functions to allows both UDP and TCP network packets to be sent. Using the new net_if he was able to boot a kernel using tftp which proved that the basic networking functions were working correctly.

Once the underlying network layer was available Zoltan moved on to the primary aim of the project, booting over HTTP. He has made good progress on this and reports that he can boot a kernel three out of four times via HTTP, clearly one of the goals for the remainder of the Summer of Code is to get this to a 100% hit rate for booting.

There is still a fair bit of work to be done but I believe that Zoltan is on track to providing a useful factility to libsa. Zoltan posted a link to his patches in a posting to the tech-net mailing list

[1 comment]