Re: Etherboot and gpxe

On 08/09/09 05:26, Michael Brown wrote:
> 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.
>   
Thanks for this important information. I will switch to a newer system 
to try.
> 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.
>   
Yes, I had trouble with the Etherboot ROM image size. It hang most of my 
systems at the beginning. With the help from the people in this alias, 
plus trimming some code, I was able to build a image small enough to fit 
into the multiple I/O device (with EEPROM) systems. It is really nice 
that gPXE will use up less option ROM space despite having a bigger ROM 
image.

Thanks a lot,
Joyce

> Michael
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day 
> trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on 
> what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with 
> Crystal Reports now.  http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july
> _______________________________________________
> Etherboot-discuss mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/etherboot-discuss
>   


--

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day 
trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on 
what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with 
Crystal Reports now.  http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july

_______________________________________________
Etherboot-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/etherboot-discuss