ASIX USB to Ethernet

[jwillis84]

Learning GitHub versus Git.

My fork still retains all the work, but its all been merged back into the Master branch, and then changes in the parent ipxe/ipxe project changes since the original Forking were pulled in to bring the code base up to date.

I did things in a really inept, bizarre way.. it felt like flying one of those model airplanes through an acrobatic backflip.. but I learned a lot about GitHub.. really I wish the Tutorials and User Guides for GitHub were less formal, they read like first year Calculus books.. slowly explaining things.. and building on topics. When all I wanted to do was 'Fly like the Eagles'..

Studying how everyone else seems to be doing things "seems" possible to me now.

And Hurray! No conflicts with the mainstream ipxe/ipxe code, the Merge went automatic with no conflicts.

If ever someone does get a chance to audit the new code from gPXE brought in and tweaked to work in iPXE for whatever criteria is being impressed upon silly coders like me.. perhaps it will be an easy "Pull" request.

I'm looking in several directions now, WinPE 5.1 testing with UNDI.dsk, xHCI controller support (this could take some time), and more USB Ethernet device chipsets.. really the new chipsets I'd like to focus on are USB3.0 capable, but some more USB2.0 should be possible.

Opinion: The old USB code, PCI drivers for the USB controller, and the USB Ethernet drivers appeared to be more a proof of concept and there weren't a lot of actual pci:vendor:device Identifiers, so instead of actually "finding" a recognized device on the bus.. it just assumed that device was on the bus and proceeded to use it. Not a bad assumption, since iPXE is often target compiled to support only one device driver at a time.. but the megalithic ipxe.dsk target would pull in everything and then it appears only one driver would load and work at runtime. Good luck guessing which one.

I know iPXE isn't trying to be a complete operating system, but the intent of the original authors did appear to be to eventually smoothly support all USB controller and USB Ethernet devices regardless of the ipxe.dsk image and regardless of which combination was in play, truly plug and play. I'd really like to honor that.

So I am collecting pci:vendor:device id codes, and usb:vendor:device id codes and beginning to insert them into the codebase. That could enlarge the codebase and might be against design preferences to keep ipxe as light and small as possible. I just don't know what the outcome will be. Which ever way it goes, I will try to be flexible.

Part time I'm also learning GitHub and the culture surrounding iPXE. A lot of that is on this board. Now some of it is on my personal blog. I think GitHub has a Wiki per forked project.. and I'll see about moving my verbose comments over there. That way if anyone goes to to the https://github.com/johntwillis/ipxe/wiki they will have [on topic] reference information.

Honestly I'm a lot more talk than code. So its going to be a little project "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu"