[ipxe-devel] IPXE and parallels on MAC

[Michael Brown]

On 08/04/14 17:07, Patel, Kalpesh wrote:
> I broke into to the shell and ran the command ifstat and route commands
> like you suggested, Michael -- ping isn't available looks like. Please see
> screenshot named 'Parallels Picture 3.png' and 'Parallels Picture after
> shell and net reset.png' for details. I welcome further debugging means
> and methods or insight hereŠ

Thanks.  (For information, the ping command isn't part of the standard 
build; see http://ipxe.org/cmd/ping for details on how to enable it.)

The ifstat output shows two interesting error categories:

   [TXE: 13 x "Error 0x2a654006" (http://ixe.org/2a654006)]
   [RXE: 6 x "Error 0x2a654006" (http://ixe.org/2a654006)]

These errors originate from

   http://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git/blob/master:/src/drivers/net/intel.c#l598
   http://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git/blob/master:/src/drivers/net/intel.c#l720

and indicate that the virtual NIC seems to have stopped processing 
packets: it is reporting an RX overrun condition (INTEL_IRQ_RXO), and 
the transmit ring has also filled up.

I suspect this is a flaw in the emulation of the Intel NIC.  We had a 
similar problem with VMware:

   http://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git/commitdiff/0c5e3df

If you're happy experimenting with driver code, then you could try 
adding some calls to intel_diag() to see what the hardware and software 
think the ring pointers are.  I've attached a sample patch which will 
dump out the ring pointers when RX overrun is first detected.

> Quite a number of you folks have suggested to move away from gpxelinux to
> ipxe since it has greater benefits. I completely agree that it does have
> number of advantages. However, in our case, the overall framework is bound
> by use of HTTP protocol only which gpxelinux, as well as built in pxe
> loader from Parallels, VMWare and VirtualBox seems to respect when I force
> set the option 210 in DHCP (see 'Parallels Picture.png' and
> 'Snip20140408_30.png').

Option 210 is specific to pxelinux.  You don't need to use it with iPXE. 
  If you give iPXE an HTTP URI, it will use HTTP.

Michael
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