Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC PATCH 00/14] Implement network booting directly into the s390-ccw BIOS

[Thomas Huth]

On 27.06.2017 23:15, Alexander Graf wrote:
> 
> On 27.06.17 13:48, Thomas Huth wrote:
[...]
>> - The code only supports TFTP (via UDP) ... I think that is OK for
>>    most use-cases, but if we ever want to support network booting
>>    via HTTP or something else that is based on TCP, we would need to
>>    use something else instead... Should we maybe rather head towards
>>    grub2, petitboot or something different instead?
> 
> IMHO the only viable next step would be to support UEFI and build on top
> of that - either by porting edk2 or U-Boot to s390x.

I can't speak of U-Boot, but you certainly don't want to port edk2 to a
big endian machine. Been there, seen that.

> The problem with solutions like petitboot or home grown grub2 targets is
> that it becomes a documentation and knowledge sharing nightmare down the
> road. The less we're different from everyone else, the easier it becomes
> to maintain s390x.

petitboot is basically a Linux system (with a shell, too). And grub2 is
also a common boot loader on x86 nowadays ... so not sure whether they
would really be a knowledge sharing nightmare? I think they would be
more common for "server" people than the U-Boot loader, which is likely
only familiar to "embedded" folks.

 Thomas