Re: Etherboot and gpxe

On Sunday 09 August 2009 06:19:26 Joyce Yu wrote:
> I built the rtl8129.rom which I think is the smallest driver among the
> gPXE NIC drivers. The image size is:
> $ ls -l bin/rtl8129.rom
> -rw-r--r--  1 joyce wheel 55808 Aug  8  2009 bin/rtl8129.rom
>
> 55k is still quite large that causes option rom overflow in the systems
> that I am working on. In the etherboot, there is an option to build
> xxx.zrom image which is almost half size of the the xxx.rom image. I
> couldn't find the same option in the gPXE.

gPXE ROMs are always compressed by default; there is no separate ".zrom" 
suffix as there was in Etherboot.

Assuming that your system supports PMM correctly, you should find that the 
gPXE ROM uses up only around 1.5kB of option ROM space; the remainder of the 
55kB is tucked away up in high memory.  This should be sufficient for pretty 
much any system.

I suspect that PMM is failing on your system, causing gPXE to remain occupying 
55kB of option ROM space.  Could you please let me know the contents of the 
ROM banner line displayed during POST?  This is the line containing something 
like

  gPXE (http://etherboot.org) - 05:00.1 C800 PCI2.10 PnP BBS PMM4000@20 C800

Please let me know exactly what this line contains on your system, and I can 
tell you what is happening.

Note that Etherboot never supported PMM, and so would always use up the full 
32kB of option ROM space.  gPXE will use up less option ROM space despite 
having a bigger ROM image, thanks to the use of PMM.

Michael

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