[ipxe-devel] ipxe fails to find Realtek card

[Robin Smidsrød]

On 27.05.2012 03:29, Dave Hansen wrote:
> Last reply to myself, I promise. ;)
> 
> I hacked out the Realtek code, and the UNDI code seems to detect and be
> able to use the card just fine.
> 
> Is there a way to build iPXE and explicitly not build certain drivers?
> In the case where NICs are not detected or the drivers fails, _should_
> it be falling back to UNDI?

If you build and chainload ipxe.kpxe it should be able to use UNDI if
there is no native driver detected for your card. But if the support for
your card is broken, I don't think that will help, as the native driver
will be chosen regardless.

You could try to build an image that contains only the drivers you need
for your network and chainload that, something like this:

make bin/intel--tg3--undi.kpxe

Only the .kpxe extension can make use of the UNDI driver, as it doesn't
unload the vendor PXE stack.

I don't think the Makefile system allows for builds where certain
drivers are excluded. As far as I know, it's only additive, not
subtractive. If you have skills in writing Makefiles I'm sure someone
would appreciate some rules that do that.

Doing something like "make bin/ipxe~realtek.kpxe" to build an
all-drivers build MINUS realtek driver would be nice.

-- Robin