[ipxe-devel] Realtek r8169 (10ec8168.rom) breaks download everytime at 47%

[Andrew Bobulsky]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 8:18 AM, Michael Brown <mbrown at fensystems.co.uk> wrote:
> On Friday 20 Apr 2012 12:39:37 Andrew Bobulsky wrote:
>> I did this some time back, and while I only ran a few tests to just
>> make sure it worked correctly, and it did.  The only caveat I found at
>> the time was that the Intel Matrix RAID BIOS seemed to conflict with
>> iPXE; that is to say that, when the Intel RAID BIOS was enabled, the
>> iPXE option ROM never loaded up, in spite of the fact that it was
>> configured to.  I tried two or three different versions of the Intel
>> ROM, and it didn't make any difference.  The conflict was always
>> present.  This did not happen with the Realtek PXE ROM, of course.
>
> It sounds as though you are running out of option ROM space.  Unfortunately,
> the rtl8169 doesn't support .mrom images, so there's no easy way around this
> other than eliminating features you don't need from the iPXE build.

That strikes me as really odd, but you would know better than I, for
certain!  The reason I say that it's odd is because I recall the iPXE
build being smaller than the stock ROM.  I'll double check on that
one, but do let me know if the size of the ROM itself doesn't play in
to that as much as one might suspect.  I can of course trim features
out and then rebuild :)

>> Coming back to the present, I decided to try out ESXi 5 on that system
>> booting from iSCSI.  The performance was terrible using the flashed-in
>> ROM.  It took about an hour to boot ESXi over 100Mbit.  I flashed the
>> stock ROM back into the BIOS, and went to a chainloaded ipxe.pxe to
>> see if that would work, but performance was identical.  I can't say
>> with any certainty which commit the ROM or the .pxe were built from,
>> but it was at least 6 months ago, and no more than a year ago.
>
> The rtl8169 driver was completely rewritten from scratch two days ago:
>
>  http://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git/commitdiff/2a0154d
>
> Have you tried this newer driver?
>
> Michael

I have to ask... are you an alien with magical powers?  The frequency
with which you have the aboslutely perfect solution to a problem
posted to the mailing list, as though you had a prophetic vision of
posts to come, is downright scary!  .... That said, I welcome our new
extraterrestrial, PXE-ROM driver programming, BIOS/EFI-wunderkind
overlord.  ..... ;D

I'll definitely give that a try!  Gotta reboot my system into Windows
and recompile ipxe.pxe, I'll test the chainload, and then if that
works I'll embed the ROM again.  I'll post back with the results.

Many Thanks,
Andrew Bobulsky