[gPXE] Trying to extend TG3 driver

[Thomas Miletich]

Hello Nick
as you have noticed the current tg3 driver in gPXE is very
out-of-date. The driver in linux mainline supports around twice as
many cards as the gPXE driver. You will probably have to backport many
special cases and PHY support functions.

Depending on how much time you are willing to invest, I think a
complete re-port of the current linux driver and completely dropping
the current gPXE one is worth considering. There are also some bugs
with cards that are actually supposed to work. It's not unlikely that
you run into some of them too.

undionly.kpxe should work, if it is loaded by the tg3's PXE rom.

Driver questions are often better answered interactively, please feel
free to join #etherboot on irc.freenode.net. There are some people
than can help with drivers.

Thanks
Thomas

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 1:42 PM, Nick Couchman <Nick.Couchman at seakr.com> wrote:
> Hello, everyone,
> I'm attempting to extend the tg3 driver to support some of the later chipsets that have come out.  I'm specifically interested in support for the PCIe-based Broadcom 5764M chipset, one that's integrated into Dell's Optiplex 160 units.  I've managed to get the basics working - I know the PCI IDs used by the card and updated tg3 with those, and I also found the chip revision of the card.  However, I'm running into some sort of issue right now with it not enabling transmit mode correctly.  Basically, all I'm trying to do is pick up a DHCP address, and the output looks something like this:
>
> DHCP (net0 AA:BB:CC:XX:YY:ZZ)....transmit timed out
> tg3_stop_block timed out, ofs=0x1400, enable_bit=002
> Link is down
> ......Link is up at 1000 Mbps, full duplex.  TX RX flow control
> ... Connection timed out (0x4c106035)
>
> I've looked at the tg3 driver in the later versions of the Linux kernel, and it seems like there are a lot of specific fixes and conditions for specific Broadcom chips.  Unfortunately, I don't really know which ones matter for gPXE and which ones can be ignored.  So, where do I need to go from here to figure out why transmit is timing out?  I'm guessing there's something about this particular chip that isn't implemented correctly in gPXE today, but what's the best way to track that down?
>
> Also, on a related topic, the network card appears to be UNDI-capable, but the undi and undionly drivers do not work correctly.  How can these drivers be extended to support this Broadcom chipset, or does that rely on the tg3 driver having support, first?
>
> Thanks - Nick
>
>
>
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