[ipxe-devel] [Realtek]: Possible bug - cannot load ipxe when intel-sata controller is set to RAID

[Joshua C.]

Let me put more light into the situation: this is a msi p67a-gd65
motherboard with am 8MB winbond bios-chip. The bios file has about 2MB
"free" space so I can put some more files on the bios-chip itself. The
motherboard uses a cheap realtek trl8111e chip which is soldgered on the
motherboard and taps one of the pci-e lanes on the chipset. PCI-E 3.0 is
not supported by the p67 chipset. The stock bios uses the propriatery
realtek pxe stack which can be downloaded from the realtek official site
(current version as of today: 2.54). The pxe stack is integrated into the
bios file and I know that the realtek stack is less than 64kb in size.

I have my custom ipxe rom which comes at about 81kb in size. As I said the
bios flashes successfully and the ipxe works correctly as long as the
intel-sata-controller is not set to raid-mode. The intel-orom is about
120kb and I know that some older versions on the intel chipset (i think p57
was it) cannot work with newer oroms because of their size.

I have disabled all other controllers on the motherboard (I don't need them
anyway). The ones being active are usb, network and intel-sata.

I can't say to the support service that I'm using a custom orom image
because of the obvious reasons...

I can compile the mrom image but since both the orom and mrom are in the
same bios file I'm not sure if this can solve the problem. As I said this
is not an expansion card with its own memory/extension bars. I can give it
a try... Should I just compile both as stated here:
http://ipxe.org/downloadand put them in the bios file? If so how can
the mrom find the orom in this
case??




2013/4/15 Michael Brown <mcb30 at ipxe.org>

> On 15/04/13 13:10, Jarrod Johnson wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 7:47 AM, Joshua C. <joshuacov at gmail.com
>> <mailto:joshuacov at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> > I have a strange problem with my bin/10ec8168.rom which I
>> > successfully flashed in my bios. The orom loads and works normally
>> > when the intel-sata controller is set to either
>> > AHCI/IDE/Disabled.When I set it to RAID-mode then the orom doesn't load.
>>
>> The thing I think most likely is that you ran out of option rom space.
>>   In x86 BIOS, it is a very limited area, and quite possibly switching
>> the intel to raid bloated its footprint enough to leave insufficient
>> space for your .rom.
>>
>> Have you tried make bin/10ec8168.mrom or does that not work with the
>> device in question?  That would be my next step.  If there are more
>> non-boot adapters that have option roms, I'd try disabling their option
>> rom support in BIOS (at least IBM BIOS allows suppresion of slot option
>> roms, I'm guessing most everyone does_.
>>
>
> I'm pretty sure that this is correct; you are running out of option ROM
> space when you enable RAID support.  Unfortunately, I don't think RTL8169s
> don't have a sufficiently large memory BAR for .mrom to work.
>
> If your BIOS supports PCI3.00 (look at the PCI version shown in iPXE's
> startup banner), and if the PMM allocations are working (check the startup
> banner for non-zero values in "PMM+xxxxxxxx+yyyyyyyy"), then you could try
> the attached patch.  This patch changes the "runtime size" field in the PCI
> ROM header to the optimistic value (i.e. the value that will be achieved
> only if the PMM allocations both work).
>
> Michael
>
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>


-- 
--joshua
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