[ipxe-devel] iPXE MemoryAllocationLib.c assert failures on Dell PowerEdge

[Christian Nilsson]

From: <Lynn.Heinemann at dell.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2018 15:05:57
Good morning,

I'm reaching out to the iPXE dev team for some possible assistance
with an issue one of our customers is seeing.  Due to confidentiality,
I cannot share details but I'm hoping to leverage some of the
community development expertise on how to further debug this issue.

In short, we have a Dell PowerEdge server and Intel 10Gb network card
that's attempting to boot in UEFI mode to a PXE server, and fails
during ipxe.efi initialization with the following error:

iPXE initialising devices...ASSERT
u:\MdePkg\Library\UefiMemoryAllocationLib\MemoryAllocationLib.c(819):
!EFI_ERROR (Status)

I have Dell engineering resources available to debug the hardware
aspect of this issue but the necessary knowledge of adding debug
functions to the iPXE efi image itself is lacking.  The version of
iPXE we're using is the following commit:

https://github.com/ipxe/ipxe/tree/1b67a0564657b6fcef18b1588ea6491ca1b1996d

I've compiled this on RedHat 7.4 and 6.2 with no flags other than a
very basic embed script that lists things like system asset
information and mac address on console but the assert is happening
within the first 3 or 4 lines of the NIC starting the PXE bootstrap.

I apologize for the slim amount of information but can you provide any
thoughts or suggestions?

Lynn Heinemann
Principal Engineer, Solutions Support Team
Dell EMC| Remote Services and Solutions
Office: +1 512 723 7471<tel:15127237471>
Lynn.Heinemann at Dell.com<mailto:Lynn.Heinemann at Dell.com>

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Hi,
Not sure if your email reached the list properly, but will answer so
it does reach the list in at least some way ;)

Which exact PCI device is this? might not be relevant but please
provide it for completeness.

if you use snponly.efi does that show the same behavior? also please
try without and with the embedded script.

The assert itself is not from iPXE code, but more probable from the
EFI firmware itself. (or some kind of efi firmware at least), it might
be in the NIC firmware that occurs when the SNP driver is loaded,
could you try to remove or disable the NIC and see if you get the same
thing?

iPXE have the syntax when building of DEBUG=any_c_file,other_c_file
here is some more info: http://ipxe.org/download#debug_builds


Official git repo is at: http://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git current master
is always recommended to try, but there don't seem to be any changes
that should have any impact here.

Regards
Christian