emBoot
Labs provides testing and certification
services to NIC and NIC ASIC vendors.
Since Intel no longer provides testing
or development kits for PXE, there is
no formalized resource that vendors can
utilize to ensure that their UNDI drivers
are 100% compliant with the PXE specification.
This is increasingly important as UNDI
drivers are being used as transport layers
for other desktop management products
(Symantec Ghost, Altiris Client Management
Suite, and many others).
Our
goal...
By promoting a
certification standard emBoot will help
raise the overall quality of UNDI drivers
which in turn will help management software
exploit their functionality as a platform-specific
transport for various purposes.
Conformance
(or compliance) testing is the verification
of a product meeting the specifications
or standards established for that particular
product. These tests can find undiscovered
bugs, and then further substantiate
that any fixes are successful. These
testing results can also provide proof
to your customers that your NICs /
LAN controllers will work better with
their products.
But
we already pass Microsoft WHQL
testing...
Microsoft
Windows WHQL testing may not be enough!
It's tests for PXE (relatively unchanged
for 4 years) are based largely on
the Intel PDK and simply launching
a RIS installation. These tests do
not thoroughly exercise all of the
APIs present that PXE and UNDI drivers
can use. See for yourself - scan
newsgroup archives or open-source
project mailing lists for numerous
mentions of PXE implementations that
do not work properly.
Why
use compliance testing?
Your
customers want the assurance that
your product meets or exceeds the
demands established for it. Compliance
testing can assist in:
-
obtaining
recognition for your
product
-
improving
the ability of your product to
compete against others
-
boosting
sales by proving that your product
has passed testing conducted
by a 3rd party certification
lab
-
lowering
the costs of supporting your
product
-
increasing
customer satisfaction by lowering
the potential of problems with
the many available PXE-enabled
software suites
Why
is PXE compliance testing important?
Apart
from it’s role in providing
network boot functionality, the PXE
transport layer (Universal Network
Driver Interface, or UNDI) is increasingly
being used as a transport layer for
other management products, such as
OS deployment or re-deployment.
In
this larger, more demanding role, many
existing implementations either
do not adhere completely to the PXE
specification, or show marginal
functionality in real world environments.
Why
use emBoot Labs for testing?
-
emBoot staff participated
in the PXE specification review process
(while part of 3Com’s Lanworks
Technologies division)
-
emBoot has
over 50 years of combined
experience with network booting
-
our custom test suite
and process for PXE compliance testing
is unmatched anywhere - we've
spent a long time carefully
putting together the most comprehensive
PXE compliance test suite available
today
-
we have a
singular focus on network booting – that
is all we do
