RE: [9fans] PXE boot?

[lucio@proxima.alt.za]

Nigel Roles says:
>
> I have a Rhine II driver, but there is enough fud on the FreeBSD
> mailing lists about the reliability of the silicon and the documentation
> is so poor I don't feel very confident about the driver.
>
You'll get poor performance at worst, in my opinion.  While fidgetting
with the PCNet driver, I realised (mistakenly, maybe) that once the
driver delivers integral ethernet packets in both directions, you're
done.  The next layers take care of making sure there's no additional
corruption.  Of course, efficiency may go out the window :-)

> The Plan 9 audio interface only supports soundblaster, and there
> is no higher level interface to allow other styles, a la devether.c.
> The Via audio pretends to be soundblaster pro, but actually only
> has the registers. Instead, the driver catches accesses to the
> registers and maps it to the real PCI device. Again, I did some
> work on this, but have stopped for now.

Sounds like a good project, putting in place a multimedia
infrastructure that is workable.  All the other OSes need to paint
themselves out of a legacy corner, Plan 9 may be luckier.

++L