Re: [Etherboot-developers] 8139 Integrated motherboard problem

Good day Soforth,

I've switched your message to the "Discussion" mailing-list, since it's
not really discussion related to the gPXE codebase, at least at this
time.  If you had found a bug and were submitting a patch, it would
perhaps be more appropriate on the "Developers'" mailing-list.

Regarding your "deaf" undionly.kpxe on PCI VENdor 0x10EC, DEVice 0x8139:

gPXE can be compiled to include selected drivers.  Thus a build called
"gpxe.XXX" will contain all gPXE NIC drivers, but a build called
"undionly.XXX" contains only the gPXE UNDI NIC driver.  That's one
difference.

The file extension, or suffix, perhaps confusingly corresponds to the
"prefix" or "media" code; the code which is prepended to gPXE for a
particular boot media scenario...
- .dsk for a floppy disk gPXE boot
- .hd for an HDD "partition" gPXE boot
- .usb for an HDD image which includes an MBR and a single "partition"
that will boot gPXE
- .pxe for chain-loading gPXE from another PXE stack
- .kpxe for chain-loading, but keeps the previous UNDI driver intact for
later pickup by gPXE's UNDI driver
- .kkpxe for chain-loading, but keeps the previous UNDI driver intact,
as well as the previous PXE stack
- .rom for flashing gPXE into a PCI ROM chip
- .lkrn for loading from any boot-loader capable of loading Linux
kernel-format images
- There are others, but these are the most common.

So undionly.kpxe = Chain-load from another PXE & keep the previous UNDI
(from the NIC's vendor, perhaps) intact [.kpxe] for later pickup by
gPXE's UNDI NIC driver, which is the only driver included [undionly].

So gpxe.pxe = Chain-load from another PXE [.pxe] & all included drivers
[gpxe] will probe the NIC to see if they can drive it.  0x10EC 0x8139 is
supported by the "legacy" Etherboot driver.

The gPXE UNDI NIC driver gently "wraps" the previous stack; this allows
for gPXE to provide its extensive feature set, while possibly using
another vendor's NIC driver.

I've compiled another undionly.kpxe which you can use at
http://etherboot.org/share/sha0/gpxe/src/bin/undionly.kpxe.  This one
will output debugging messages for the [DEBUG=undi,undinet,arp,dhcp]
modules to your video display, as well as to the serial console.  If you
can connect a serial cable to the PC's COM port, you can capture these
messages to a log.  On the computer system to receive the messages, you
can do:

screen /dev/ttyS0

If you submit a log of the debugging messages in your next e-mail
response, that might help to identify the trouble.

Sorry I couldn't help you more last night, but sleep is important. :)

- Shao Miller

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