[ipxe-devel] Issue with Realtek card and iPXE

[Michael Brown]

On Sunday 02 Sep 2012 19:26:32 Michael wrote:
> I have a few boxes that I net boot using gpxe including one box with a
> realtek card. Under Linux, it shows up as:
> 
> 04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B
> PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 03)
> 
> Using gpxe 1.0.1, it would fail to boot with the message “initialising
> devices…". This is also reflected in the etherboot wiki:
> http://etherboot.org/wiki/hardwareissues. However, I used the rom-o-matic
> to build a 1.0.1+ version of undionly and it has worked well on this
> motherboard for at least a year. I assumed the issue was resolved.
> 
> So today, when I upgraded to iPXE, I was a little surprised to see this
> error message return.  Does anyone have any suggestions why it would work
> in gpxe 1.0.1+, but not with a current version of ipxe?
> 
> What is the best way to debug this?

You can try

  http://ipxe.org/howto/bisect

to track down the commit which caused the regression, assuming that you can 
identify an old commit which works.

I'm assuming that you're using undionly.kpxe.  You could try using the native 
driver for Realtek cards instead: build "ipxe.pxe" instead of "undionly.kpxe".

Michael