[gPXE] Best supported PCIe NIC?

[Andrew Robbie (Gmail)]

-resent because of listserver line breaks-

On 27/02/2010, at 4:18 AM, Thomas Miletich wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 4:24 PM, Andrew Robbie (Gmail)
> <andrew.robbie at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I would like to identify which in-production PCI Express NICs have
>> good gPXE support. So, far example, I am pretty sure the D-Link
>> DGE-560T is a Marvell Yukon, using the sky2 driver, and I can buy it.
>>
>> Can anyone supply any other (NIC retail name, chipset, driver)  
>> tuples?
>> I am particularly interested in any Intel or Broadcom Tigon 3 (tg3)
>> NICs.
>
> While gPXE does have a tg3 driver, it it quite old. It hasn't been
> updated for a while and likely doesn't support new tg3 models.

Thanks, that is good to know.

> The current e1000 driver supports a few PCIe cards, see the PCI IDs at
> http://rom-o-matic.net/gpxe/gpxe-git/gpxe.git/src/bin/NIC

Yep, no problem once I have the card, but I haven't seen any vendors  
mentioning the  PCI ID; though Intel says which of their many chipsets  
is on each NIC, and some vendors provide or point to linux drivers.

Syskonnect SK-9Exx/SK-9Sxx (including SK-9E21D 'desktop' adapter) use  
the Marvell Yukon chipset. The PCI ID of the SK-9E21D is buried in the  
manual as a screencap (Vendor:1148 Device:9E00 Subvendor:1148  
Subsystem:21D0), which matches what rom-o-matic knows (uses sky2  
driver).

The Allied Telesis cards seem to be Broadcom Nextreme II (BCM 57xx)  
but I'm not sure which ones. The driver they supply is recent (14 Jan  
2010) so perhaps they use recent Broadcom chips. The BCM5708 upwards  
are PCIe and all (except 5716) support iSCSI offload, but none appear  
to have support according to rom-o-matic.

> gPXE's project leader, Marty Connor, is working on an e1000e driver.
> You can download a test version at
> http://etherboot.org/pipermail/gpxe/2010-January/000312.html

Thanks for the pointer, I'd missed that message. Once gPXE supports  
e1000e it is going to be deployed widely I think, especially in the  
Windows SAN boot role; I know I am sick of imaging lots of Windows  
disks.

> There is also a PCIe version of the Realtek 8169 cards which should be
> supported.

Interesting. The Realtek 8169 is a PCI part; is it known if it is the  
same interface as the new PCIe parts (RTL8111 and RTL8168 families)?

Regards,
Andrew
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