[gPXE] wrong mac with rtl8139 nic on qemu-kvm

[James]

Hi Thomas,

I have not tried without kvm at this point.

When MAC starts with a non-zero first octet,
it has not been reproducible so far.
A bit counter to the statement I made in the previous
email.. I have also had times when the problem does
not occur even after 10 or more reboots when MAC does
start with 00.

Timing problem seems to be the most likely scenario to me.

I am also in touch with qemu/kvm developers on this.

This has not been reproducible with e1000 nor virtio
network device emulation.

Thanks,
James

On 19-Dec-09 20:41 Thomas Miletich wrote:
> Hello James,
> Etherboot is using a different r8139 driver which is also using
> different code to read the MAC address. Different behavior could be
> explained by this.
> It would be very helpful to know if you can reproduce this behavior
> with qemu without kvm. If you can't reproduce it with qemu without kvm
> it could indicate a timing issue.
> Another interesting thing to know would be which address you get if
> you change the MAC address to start with something different than
> 00(qemu -net nic,model=rtl8139,macaddr=01:02:03:04:05:06).  The
> interesting part is the first octet. I assume that it will be 00 no
> matter what you specify, but it helps to know for sure.
> 
> Hopefully I will be able to go through the SPI code in gPXE tomorrow
> or on Monday. Maybe this reveals some possible causes for this issue.
> I've never heard of this issue on real hardware before, so I think we
> should consider a qemu-kvm bug too.
> 
> Thanks for reporting
> Thomas
> 
> On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 2:22 AM, James <kojeroo at telus.net> wrote:
>> hi... i have a problem with gPXE 0.9.9 for rtl8139 10ec:8139 and qemu-kvm
>>
>> The first pass of the boot the device mac is sometimes incorrect...
>> I see 00:00:d8:ab:e2:7e instead of 00:21:d8:ab:e2:7e.
>> The second octet is 00 instead of 21 in the mac.
>>
>> Is this a known problem?
>>
>> I don't have this problem if I try with the etherboot rom however.
>>
>> My DHCP server does not return an IP for unknown MAC addresses.
>>
>> gPXE 0.9.9 -- Open Source Boot Firmware -- http://etherboot.org
>> Features: FTP HTTP HTTPS DNS TFTP bzImage COMBOOT ELF Multiboot NBI PXE
>> PXEXT
>>
>> net0: 00:00:d8:ab:e2:7e on PCI00:03.0 (open)
>>   [Link:up, TX:0 TXE:0 RX:0 RXE:0]
>> DHCP (net0 00:00:d8:ab:e2:7e)................ Connection timed out
>> (0x4c106035)
>> No more network devices
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> gPXE 0.9.9 -- Open Source Boot Firmware -- http://etherboot.org
>> Features: FTP HTTP HTTPS DNS TFTP bzImage COMBOOT ELF Multiboot NBI PXE
>> PXEXT
>>
>> net0: 00:21:d8:ab:e2:7e on PCI00:03.0 (open)
>>   [Link:up, TX:0 TXE:0 RX:0 RXE:0]
>> DHCP (net0 00:21:d8:ab:e2:7e).... ok
>> net0: 2.43.241.156/255.255.255.240 gw 2.43.241.145
>> Booting from filename "pxelinux.0"
>> tftp://2.43.241.155/pxelinux.0.. ok
>>
>> James
>>
>>
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>>
>>