Etherboot 5.2.4

Here are some things you should be aware of:

There is a bug in the Perl supplied with RH9 (and possibly RH8). It
assumes UTF-8 even with the use bytes pragma. Either get an updated Perl
package or set LANG to en_US (or whatever your language name is, the
important thing is without the .UTF-8 suffix).

You can build an image that contains all the drivers. It's called
etherboot.zdsk (and other suffixes). It is advisable to restrict the
drivers to either ISA or PCI to reduce the footprint and also to avoid
unnecessary probing of the bus you don't have. Also note that if the
.com image is larger than 64kB, it will not work because .com images can
only carry 64kB worth of code.

The Quit option (formerly called Local) when ASK_PROMPT is defined will
take you back to the invoking environment, which is the BIOS for .zrom
images, DOS for .com images and nothing for .zdsk images.  Therefore if
you are booting from floppy, the behaviour of Q is undefined.  It is
unknown what LILO and other bootloaders do if a .zlilo image returns,
probably they don't expect a return.  Also note that the Q option will
also become undefined if anything is partially loaded that overwrites
the return trail to the environment.

The .lzdsk images used to work from a raw hard disk in 5.0 but the 5.2
.zdsk doesn't any more because it's too hard to support large images
with the old boot1a.s. Since very few people boot from a raw hard disk
(flash disks and supporting BIOSes seem to have some kind of filesystem
on it already rather than work like a raw hard disk) this is not going
to be fixed. Instead, you should use a bootloader like LILO to launch
Etherboot. If you feel inclined to write a hdload.S counterpart to
floppyload.S, feel free.

The Lance driver does not work under -DRELOCATE. This is due to the
assumption of 24 bit registers in older NICs. The solution for now is to
not define RELOCATE for Lance ROMs. The longer term solution for PCI
Lances is to adapt the pcnet32 driver from Linux, which handles 32 bit
register capability of the newer PCI Lance chips.
