[Openib-windows] Fabric usage at boot time

[Fab Tillier]

> From: Jan Bottorff [mailto:jbottorff at xsigo.com]
> Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 7:18 PM
> 
> I was noticing none of the the fabric or hw drivers are designated as boot
> load drivers in the INF.
> 
> Is there any plan to do the work required to make all the drivers work at boot
> time, allowing the possibility of creating systems that can boot over the IB
> fabric?

I would love to see boot over IB functionality in the Windows OpenIB stack.  I
don't have any hardware to test this, though, so it will likely be delayed until
someone else that does have hardware tries it, or I get hardware and time to do
so myself.

There is support for PXE boot over IPoIB, but there isn't any handoff between
the BIOS and OS during boot in this configuration.

I personally don't know enough about the details of the handoff between BIOS
environment and the OS to be able to tell what's needed from the stack to
support this.  Can you point me to any readings that would help clarify things?
If there are obvious things that we can do to prepare the drivers for boot
support, even in the absence of actual test environment, that would be great.

Thanks,

- Fab