[ipxe-devel] NIC Drivers DEBUG=nii:3 output

[Dean Westhead]

Hi,

I am not sure what has been changed on the NII driver between the two versions, but I have tried copying 
all of the nii* files from the old version into the new version ( so just that driver is using the old version ),
and the NIC's are now detected as they should be when I compile the new version of iPXE.

It looks like something in that commit has changed so that they dont get detected any more after the commit.

Dean.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Brown" <mcb30 at ipxe.org>
To: "Dean Westhead" <dean at westhead.net>
Cc: "ipxe-devel" <ipxe-devel at lists.ipxe.org>
Sent: Thursday, 11 May, 2017 13:17:34
Subject: Re: [ipxe-devel] NIC Drivers DEBUG=nii:3 output

On 11/05/17 10:44, Dean Westhead wrote:
> He is the capture from the old version when the ifopen net0 command is run :
> 
> 0m[39m[49m[2JiPXE> [?25hifopen net0
> [31mNII NII-0000:06:00.0 issuing 05:0000 ifnum 0 cpb db
> [0m[31m6b5a2326 : ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 : ................
> 6b5a2336 : 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-00 00                   : ..........
> [0m[31m6b5a231a : 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-00 00 00 00             : ............
> [0m[31mNII NII-0000:06:00.0 could not set station address: Operation not supported (http://ipxe.org/3c6a4083)
> [0m[31mNII NII-0000:06:00.0 issuing 09:801b ifnum 0
> [0miPXE>

Thank you.  We can see here that the 09:801b command succeeds, though 
this exact same command fails when the newer build is used.

There is no obvious cause for this.  It is plausible at this point that 
the underlying NII may be over-sensitive to alignment of some of the 
data structures, and that the problem is being triggered by what are 
effectively random changes in memory addresses between different builds, 
rather than by any of the code changes.

I can only suggest that you capture the serial port output for both 
builds right from the start (from "iPXE initialising devices..." up to 
the "iPXE>" prompt after the "ifopen net0" command) and compare them to 
see if there are any differences earlier in the process.

You can clean up the output (and make it easier to compare) by 
eliminating the ANSI colour codes from the serial port debug output:

   make bin-x86_64-efi/ipxe.efi DEBUG=nii:3 DBGCOL=0

or by using terminal software that will display the ANSI colours 
correctly (instead of printing the raw "[0m[31m" sequences).

Michael