Hi Dave,
On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 10:19 -0500, David Updegraff wrote:
Hi.
looking for interest to support mutlicast tftp in u-boot. I have a version working according to RFC2090 working with 'atftp' with only a dozen or so lines patch in net/tftp.c and a few in net/net.c. But the messy part is that the ethernet driver needs to have hooks to set up mcast ether-addrs...
Has there already been a discussion about this that I missed that someone could refer me to?
This looks interesting. Have you done much testing to see how it reduces network traffic and server loading? I imagine you'd probably need quite a few boards booting simultaneously to see any benefit.
Anyway, I wouldn't worry too much about having to modify Ethernet drivers to add mcast addresses. I expect that interest in this feature will be fairly low, and adding an mcast address to a MAC is typically not very complicated. It's pretty common in Linux drivers so people can always steal from there.
I'm a little more worried about purging the entries when you're done, since I imagine you would typically want to enter Linux or whatever with an empty multicast hash table. Maybe this isn't an issue, though.
regards, Ben