[ipxe-devel] Apple EFI Issue, Looking to Write a Patch

[Alex McWhirter]

This is more or less an issue with Apple choosing to create their own EFI system rather than adhere to standards. gPXE and early iPXE builds work great with Apple EFI due the the fact that gPXE/iPXE would forcibly reset the network drivers rather than allow EFI to control this. This was fixed in later builds of iPXE as it appeared to cause issues with some EFI firmware.

The problem is that Apple’s EFI firmware loads the NIC drivers and hands them to NetBoot (Apple’s EFI network booting solution) before iPXE can load, causing iPXE to fail on NIC discovery. My thoughts were to write a patch to detect Apple EFI and reset the EFI drivers if detected, but this is kind of a hack. Does anyone have any better proposed ways of dealing with this?