[ipxe-devel] 486 with a Realtek 8139

[Michael Brown]

On 15/05/2021 22:56, Nikolai Zhubr wrote:
> One note is that I had to compile using the default ancient system gcc 
> compiler with:
> "make -j1 bin/10ec8139.kpxe EMBED=chain.ipxe"
> where gcc says:
> gcc (SUSE Linux) 4.8.3
> 
> An attempt to cross-compile using my preferred 486 toolchain with gcc 
> 7.5 fails because DEPS start going circles forever. For that attempt, I 
> used:
> "make -j1 CROSS_COMPILE=... ARCH=x86 bin/10ec8139.kpxe EMBED=chain.ipxe"
> 
> Usually, the command line like above works fine.

Not sure where you got the notion of using "ARCH=x86" from - there is no 
"x86" build architecture supported in iPXE, no documentation suggesting 
that it does, and no documentation suggesting that "ARCH=..." should 
ever be specified on the build command line.  This will be the cause of 
your circular DEPS problem.

You can keep it simple and just build using any reasonably current (less 
than 10 years old) Linux distro's default gcc, with the command:

   make bin/10ec8139.pxe

(note .pxe rather than .kpxe - the .kpxe suffix is for the undionly.kpxe 
build target only, as per all available documentation).

There is no need to use -j1, and no need for any custom gcc toolchain.

You also have the option of using bin/ipxe.pxe, which will contain the 
full set of PCI NIC drivers.  There's a prebuilt version downloadable at 
all times from

   http://boot.ipxe.org/ipxe.pxe

Thanks for testing,

Michael