[ipxe-devel] 486 with a Realtek 8139

[Nikolai Zhubr]

Hi all,

I'm having some trouble getting a Realtek 8139 card to boot successfully 
on a 486 box.

Long ago I made an rtl8139 rom using Etherboot project and flashed it 
into a number of EEPROM chips. I found them working fine with all 
systems I tried starting Pentium1. However, 486s had problems. 
Basically, pxelinux failed to run somehow, whereas if using Realtek's 
official ROM blob, pxelinux started successfully. Now I'm trying to 
workaround/fix/understand the issue.

My new idea was to chainload most current 8139 native image built from 
iPXE to see if it runs well on 486. Unfortunately, it does not:

========= Screenshot ==========
Loading 192.168.0.99:10ec8139.pxe ...(PXE)............................done
PXE->EB: !PXE at 9F40:0000, entry point at 9F40:0680
UNDI code segment 9F40:0AAD, data segment 9E40:1000 (633-640kB)
UNDI device is PCI 00:0E.0, type Etherboot (workaround enabled)
640kB free base memory after PXE unload
(nothing happens after that line, like completely hanging)
===============================

Supposedly there should not be any Pentium+ dependancies, right?
Any other hints before I start digging through?


Thank you,

Regards,
Nikolai