[ipxe-devel] Link detection on Atheros AR8132

[Michael Brown]

On 11/11/13 13:33, Sven Dreyer wrote:
> lspci reports the chip as:
> 01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR8132 Fast Ethernet (rev c0)
>
> The problem now is: using iPXE, it does not detect the link correctly.
> When iPXE says "Link:up", the link LED on the switch is still off. It
> takes another 13 seconds until it goes on. During this time, iPXE runs
> into a DHCP timeout, I think.
>
> Find attached two screenshots built with "DEBUG=undionly:3,undinet:3".
>
> I use ipxe.kpxe (c3d1), which does not have a native driver and falls
> back to UNDI, if I got it right. But the problem is not related any
> specific version of iPXE.

You could try using undionly.kpxe instead.  ipxe.kpxe isn't currently a 
sensible option: the ".kpxe" part means that the PXE stack won't get 
fully unloaded, but the "ipxe." part means that the UNDI driver will get 
reloaded from ROM (rather than using the preexisting UNDI driver).  This 
is likely to change at some point in future, but for now the choices are 
essentially:

   - use ipxe.pxe if you want to chainload and use a native iPXE driver, or

   - use undionly.kpxe if you want to chainload and use the underlying 
UNDI driver.

If that doesn't help, then the Linux atl1c driver looks fairly 
straightforward, and creating a native iPXE driver for this card should 
take only one or two days, given suitable test hardware.  Do you know of 
any plug-in PCI cards using the atl1c driver?

Michael