[gPXE] resolving layer-2/layer-3 readiness issues

[Silver, Geoffrey]

Our network infrastructure seems to have a significant delay between Layer 2 and Layer 3 readiness. This can cause failures to download bootfile; the request times out.  This patch is a bit of a hack - we've done some testing and with a 2 second sleep we still sometimes have issues, but have never had an issue with a 3 second sleep after 10,000+ gPXEs.

As a suggestion, probably the correct way to resolve this is to have boot_next_server_and_filename() or maybe imgfetch() go through a series of sleeps and retries until it succeeds or times out.  Unfortunately what I have below works for me, and being short-staffed I don't have the time to turn it into a proper patch.

--- gpxe.orig/src/usr/autoboot.c 2009-10-21 14:05:47.000000000 -0500
+++ gpxe.new/src/usr/autoboot.c 2009-11-23 10:49:07.000000000 -0600
@@ -21,6 +21,7 @@
#include <string.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <errno.h>
+#include <unistd.h>
#include <gpxe/netdevice.h>
#include <gpxe/dhcp.h>
#include <gpxe/settings.h>
@@ -172,6 +173,8 @@
        fetch_ipv4_setting ( NULL, &next_server_setting, &next_server );
        fetch_string_setting ( NULL, &filename_setting, buf, sizeof ( buf ) );
        if ( buf[0] ) {
+               printf ( "Sleeping 3 seconds to complete port init...\n" );
+               sleep(3);
                printf ( "Booting from filename \"%s\"\n", buf );
                return boot_next_server_and_filename ( next_server, buf );
        }


--
Geoffrey Silver
Global Infrastructure
CITADEL


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