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

[Lynn.Heinemann at dell.com]

Dell - Internal Use - Confidential  

I really appreciate the quick reply, no we have not attempted to use the snponly.efi only the compiled ipxe.efi provided by our end user.  To date, this error has only occurred within the end user environment, I have been unable to recreate it in my lab.  I'm looking for options to increase the value of our debugging with the end user.  The network card being used is a Dell branded Intel X710 4 port SFP daughter card pci identifier 8086:1572:1028:0000.

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

-----Original Message-----
From: Christian Nilsson [mailto:nikize at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2018 1:51 PM
To: Heinemann, Lynn <Lynn_Heinemann at Dell.com>
Cc: iPXE Developer List <ipxe-devel at ipxe.org>
Subject: RE: iPXE MemoryAllocationLib.c assert failures on Dell PowerEdge

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