[ipxe-devel] BCM5751M Question

[Wes Frazier]

I will definitely take the speed issues into consideration. Although I
remain curious:

How can I determine if a network card supports a rom larger than 64kb?
How can I tell if a network card supports a mrom image?


        On Sun Sep 18 09:40:15 BST 2011, Robin Smidsrød wrote:
        > I have a BCM5751M NIC in a Thinkpad I would like to flash w/
        iPXE. My
        > understanding is that it will likely work with the tg3 driver
        once I add
        > the PCI ID (as per the old gPXE mailing list here:
        > http://www.mail-archive.com/gpxe@etherboot.org/msg01194.html )
        
        I'd just like to remind you that the tg3 driver is really,
        really, slow.
        I have one in my laptop HP Compaq 6730b, and anything except
        UNDI
        chainloading is a really slow experience. I might remember
        wrong, but I
        benchmarked it to something like 2-3MB/s with UNDI and something
        like
        30-50KB/s with tg3 native driver. If possible, I'd suggest
        updating the
        ROM on your BCM5751M to the latest Broadcom PXE ROM and
        chainloading
        undionly.kpxe.
        
        >From what I remember, someone suggested doing a tg3 rewrite for
        the gPXE
        GSoC 2011, but I'm not sure if that project was completed or
        not. If it
        was, we should probably try to merge that new driver into iPXE
        (not
        something I know how to do, though).
        
        -- Robin