[ipxe-devel] Mac Mini rEFIt to PXE Boot

[Charles Ott]

My assignment is to get the Mac Minis to boot as thin clients for Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTSP. I have made some progress by doing the following:

Install a Mac OS Partition on a thumbdrive with rEFIt. http://refit.sourceforge.net/
Place an MSDOS FAT partition on the same thumbdrive with iPXE. http://ipxe.org/download

This actually allowed me to utilize the rEFIt bootloader and start the SYSLINUX imaged FAT partition withe configuration pointing at the iPXE kernel.

However, no network card was found.

So I got the Device and Vendor ID from the Broadcom 57766-A1:
Vendor ID: 0x14e4
Device ID: 0x1686

And added it to the file: /ipxe/src/drivers/net/tg3/tg3.c

Which looks something like this:

static struct pci_device_id tg3_nics[] = {
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x1644, "14e4-1644", "14e4-1644", 0),
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x1645, "14e4-1645", "14e4-1645", 0),
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x1646, "14e4-1646", "14e4-1646", 0),
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x1647, "14e4-1647", "14e4-1647", 0),
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x1648, "14e4-1648", "14e4-1648", 0),
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x164d, "14e4-164d", "14e4-164d", 0),
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x1653, "14e4-1653", "14e4-1653", 0),
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x1654, "14e4-1654", "14e4-1654", 0),
...
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x1686, "14e4-1686", "14e4-1686", 0),

Recompiled the kernel and a rEFIt -> iPXE boot actually got the Link up on the network card and I can see the requests in the DHCP server logs. However, the iPXE command: ifstat shows 0 RX and 0 RXE. As if the response packets are not being captured. At this point I am dead in the water.



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