[ipxe-devel] Network Stack Initialization on Apollo Lake Systems

[Jacob Caughfield]

Hi all,

I've run into an issue where ipxe.efi fails to detect/initialize any NICs
when the uefi network stack is disabled. When the stack is enabled,
everything works perfectly. However, as I understand it, iPXE does not
require the UEFI stack as long as it has a driver for the NICs -- indeed on
our non Apollo Lake systems with the same NICs (I210  8086:1533) the UEFI
network stack does not need to be enabled for iPXE to detect and initialize
the interface.

So far every Apollo Lake system we've tested (5 or so baseboards)
exhibit this issue. Here's a paste <https://pastebin.com/mimn0s9E> of a log
from a failing system, the failure being:

EFIDRV PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x14,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x0)/Pci(0x1,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x0)
could not connect new drivers: Error 0x7f37e09a

It appears to me like the uefi ConnectController boot service is what
actually returns the error, but it I don't think that iPXE controls the
internal behavior of that function; perhaps the root cause of failure is
elsewhere? It could be that Apollo Lake simply implements some critical
component in a different location, and we would merely need to point iPXE
there in order to work around the issue -- but I don't understand the iPXE
stack well enough to really speculate.

Do you have any suggestions on how we could continue to debug, or how we
could potentially work around this issue?

Thanks!

- Jacob

-- 
Jacob Caughfield
Engineering
OnLogic <http://www.onlogic.com/>
Main: +1 802 861 2300
Logic Supply is now OnLogic. Learn more at www.onlogic.com/logic-supply
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