[gPXE] Best supported PCIe NIC?

[Thomas Miletich]

On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 9:53 AM, Andrew Robbie (Gmail)
<andrew.robbie at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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)?

I haven't tested it myself as I don't have such a card, but the driver
code mentions these model numbers and should support them. From a
quick glance at the code the PCIe variants don't seem to be much
different from the PCI variants.

> Regards,
> Andrew
>
>