[gPXE] undionly and new HP serverengines NIC

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 4:12 PM, Roberts, Adam
<adam.roberts at citadelgroup.com> wrote:
> Hi Stefan,
>
> There is indeed some error output when compiled with that debug option.
>
> I see:
>
> PXEPARENT PXENV_UNDI_SET_STATION_ADDRESS failed: Input/output error (0x1d862039)
>
> PXEPARENT parameters at 9603:1ae0 length 0x12, entry point at 9b8b:0109
> PXEPARENT parameters provided:
> 96031ae0 : 00 00 78 e7 d1 fa 9a c0-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 : ..x.............
> 96031af0 : 00 00
> PXEPARENT parameters returned:
> 96031ae0 : 00 00 78 e7 d1 fa 9a c0-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 : ..x.............
> 96031af0 : 00 00
>
> I should have mentioned initially, this is gPXE 1.0.1.
>
> Does this help identify the issue?

Hi Adam,
The following comment from gpxe/arch/i386/drivers/net/undinet.c
suggests some PXE stacks return an error but will work anyway:

        /* Set station address.  Required for some PXE stacks; will
         * spuriously fail on others.  Ignore failures.  We only ever
         * use it to set the MAC address to the card's permanent value
         * anyway.
         */

So unfortunately this doesn't reveal what the issue is.

I think there are two approaches now: adding more debugging to
existing gPXE code or finding another UNDI driver to see if that
works.  For example, an older version of gPXE or a DOS UNDI driver
might give different results and help you determine the cause of this
problem.

It is difficult to interact with all vendor firmware components, some
have bugs or interpret specifications differently.  This is one reason
why native gPXE drivers are valuable - they can be debugged and fixed
by the community.  Firmware blobs can't so we're stuck trying to find
out what it is doing and then seeing if a workaround is possible.

At first glance the Linux benet code doesn't look too hairy.  I notice
it has firmware loading support, not sure if the NIC *needs* firmware
in order to operate or whether that is just for updating.  Firmware
can be a problem in the this environment since it may cause gPXE to
exceed the 64 KB option ROM budget.  (That's only a problem for .rom
images.)

Stefan