[ipxe-devel] iPXE EFI handover protocol - experienced developer wanted

[Felix Jacobi]

Dear iPXE developers,

I am asking on behalf of our managing director and head of software
development at IServ GmbH, Brunswick, Germany. We're using iPXE as part
of our software deployment and client management solution to perform the
PXE network boot. With some of our customer's devices (usually
notebooks) we encountered the error "Exec format error
(http://ipxe.org/2e008081)" while booting Linux kernels together with an
initramfs using iPXE.

Last year in September I opened a thread on this mailing list asking for
support to analyze the problem:
https://lists.ipxe.org/pipermail/ipxe-devel/2019-September/006759.html.
Following recommendations from other participants here, various
potential causes of the problem were investigated and dismissed.

In the past we have used the PXELINUX component of the SYSLINUX project
instead of iPXE to perform the PXE boot which worked fine on the
affected devices. According to the last result of the causal analysis I
performed, it seems that PXELINUX uses a feature called "EFI Handover
Protocol" (see
https://lists.syslinux.org/archives/syslinux-commits/2013-July/002387.html)
which probably circumvents broken EFI image loading function of the
firmware and instead executes the EFI stub of the Linux kernel directly.

We're therefore searching a developer experienced in iPXE who is able to
implement support for the EFI Handover Protocol in iPXE in exchange for
payment like it is already implemented in the PXELINUX project, as we
assume that this way the problems with the faulty firmware can be
circumvented.

We already addressed a similar request to vendor-support at ipxe.org
several months ago - unfortunately it came to nothing after a good start
and no further response was received although it looked very promising.
As we did not see further possibilities I am trying it on this way now.

If you are interested and experienced, please contact us at
info at iserv.eu to discuss more precise details with our managing director.

-- 
Best regards,

Felix Jacobi

IServ GmbH
Bültenweg 73
38106 Braunschweig

Phone:			        0531-2243666-0
Fax:				0531-2243666-9
E-mail:				felix.jacobi at iserv.eu
Web:			        https://www.iserv.eu
Tax ID:			        DE265149425
Executive directors:		Benjamin Heindl, Martin Hüppe, Jörg Ludwig
Principles on privacy:		https://www.iserv.eu/privacy

Verify my identity: https://github.com/FelixJacobi/gpg-keys

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