[gPXE-devel] Broadcom 5709 Driver Support within GPXE

[Sascha Zindel]

Hi there,

i just subscribed to this list as i got stuck while trying to figure out how
to use a broadcom card using the 5709 chip together with gpxe.
As this is the development list for gpxe i hope that someone can help me out
here.

So far i figured out that the bnx2 driver within gpxe is rather old and does
not support new cards such as cards using the 5709 or 5716 chip.
Although i am not a skilled programmer, i tried to understand the
possibility of incorporating support for these chips within gpxe.

Therefore i compared the official broadcom driver 2.0.8b from the broadcom
website with the driver included within gpxe and found
that the version used within gpxe is a spinoff of an older broadcom driver.

While trying to evaluate the possibility of transforming the current
broadcom driver to be usable within gpxe, i found that there has been one
major
significant change preventing a fast transformation:
- compressed firmware files

The new broadcom driver makes use of parts of the zlib library to unzip
broadcom firmware data provided within bnx2_fw.h/bnx2_fw2.h.
Unfortunately gpxe does not seem to include the zlib library.

So i wonder if someone could help me regarding this topic by pointing out a
solution for this problem or either even provide a customized version
including support for these chips.

Kind regards,

Sascha Zindel
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