[U-Boot-Users] multicast tftp: RFC2090

[Ben Warren]

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