GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2010

Etherboot Project

Web Page: http://etherboot.org/wiki/soc/ideas

Mailing List: http://etherboot.org/mailman/listinfo

Etherboot Project creates Open Source software that allows computers to be booted over a network. This is useful in a variety of applications such as offices, schools, banks, supercomputer clusters, kiosks, and many other situations which benefit from centralized administration and maintainance of resources. gPXE is our widely-used, state-of-the-art network bootloader which combines PXE compatibility with features such as HTTP booting and SAN (e.g. iSCSI and AoE) booting.

Projects

  • Device driver implementation The aim of this project is to implement a driver for a currently unsupported NIC either by writing one from scratch or by porting an already existing open-source implementation.
  • Implement and Porting Ethernet Drivers for gPXE In order to have better performance on JMicron Ethernet Card. Instead of using the UNDI driver, I would implement a better performance native driver for gPXE. The tg3 driver of gPXE project still using old etherboot API, I would buy a Broadcom NIC and try to port it into new gPXE API.
  • Usermode debugging under Linux Allow gPXE to run as a usermode application under Linux on both i386 and x86_64. Hence opening new debugging possibilities and shortening the development cycle considerably.