(2017-03-15 15:29)speleo14 Wrote:  

(2017-03-15 14:43)mastacontrola Wrote:  I don't have an account, though creating one shouldn't be too problematic.

Yes it is, because it's not for free (Apple.... ).

(2017-03-15 14:43)mastacontrola Wrote:  That said, as this does appear to be a firmware issue, if we can't hold our breaths that a fix will come to place, might it be easier to find out a "change log" of what was changed between firmware B05 vs. B15? Even if it means something was added/adjusted that might be able to be corrected for in the iPXE BCM driver handling? Of course this would lead down a road that would essentially make the Mac's only usable on an 'ipxe' created driver system (Leaving out SNP/SNPONLY I suppse?)

Just thoughts in my head. I don't expect we'll see Apple pushing out a fix for this because of iPXE not working, but maybe we can get what was changed so the Opensource community might be able to provide a work around.

I agree that Apple will probably not fix this (or at least not in the near future), but I have no idea how and where to get any information on what was changed in the firmware...

I checked the Sierra installer and indeed there are 2 install packages there that refer to firmware (EmbeddedOsFirmware.pkg and FirmwareUpdate.pkg); unfortunately, both are .pkg files of the newer type (single binaries, not directories) so there is no possibility to look into them.
Additionally, I checked if the new firmware version for the Late 2015 iMac is available as a download, but it isn't (and neither is the older on that is working).

I have absolutely no experience with Boot ROMs and firmware, so I'm out of ideas what we could try. Anyone else? I have enough (different) Macs here that I can use for testing if anybody has any suggestions on WHAT to test.

(2017-03-15 15:48)mastacontrola Wrote:  

(2017-03-15 15:29)speleo14 Wrote:  

(2017-03-15 14:43)mastacontrola Wrote:  I don't have an account, though creating one shouldn't be too problematic.

Yes it is, because it's not for free (Apple.... ).

(2017-03-15 14:43)mastacontrola Wrote:  That said, as this does appear to be a firmware issue, if we can't hold our breaths that a fix will come to place, might it be easier to find out a "change log" of what was changed between firmware B05 vs. B15? Even if it means something was added/adjusted that might be able to be corrected for in the iPXE BCM driver handling? Of course this would lead down a road that would essentially make the Mac's only usable on an 'ipxe' created driver system (Leaving out SNP/SNPONLY I suppse?)

Just thoughts in my head. I don't expect we'll see Apple pushing out a fix for this because of iPXE not working, but maybe we can get what was changed so the Opensource community might be able to provide a work around.

I agree that Apple will probably not fix this (or at least not in the near future), but I have no idea how and where to get any information on what was changed in the firmware...

I checked the Sierra installer and indeed there are 2 install packages there that refer to firmware (EmbeddedOsFirmware.pkg and FirmwareUpdate.pkg); unfortunately, both are .pkg files of the newer type (single binaries, not directories) so there is no possibility to look into them.
Additionally, I checked if the new firmware version for the Late 2015 iMac is available as a download, but it isn't (and neither is the older on that is working).

I have absolutely no experience with Boot ROMs and firmware, so I'm out of ideas what we could try. Anyone else? I have enough (different) Macs here that I can use for testing if anybody has any suggestions on WHAT to test.

According to here:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201518

The latest firmware is now B16? Any chance of updating and seeing if something was addressed there?

(2017-06-13 14:44)mastacontrola Wrote:  I don't know if it's a problem we in the iPXE community can fix or if we actually do need to talk with Apple to try to get a suitable fix for this.

(2017-06-13 15:24)NiKiZe Wrote:  

(2017-06-13 14:44)mastacontrola Wrote:  I don't know if it's a problem we in the iPXE community can fix or if we actually do need to talk with Apple to try to get a suitable fix for this.

As has already been confirmed to be an issue with newer firmware, but not with older firmware, so contacting Apple should definitely be done.
With that said this is also an issue on non Apple machines if the NIC ends up in the same state. What is needed is to find out which register in the NIC is affected, so 2 machines with the same nic (one working firmware and one with issues) and then dumping the nics registers might give information about what needs to be done. and maybe comparing this to some other driver (linux?) but even better if we could get datasheets.

(2017-06-13 15:24)NiKiZe Wrote:  What is needed is to find out which register in the NIC is affected, so 2 machines with the same nic (one working firmware and one with issues) and then dumping the nics registers might give information about what needs to be done. and maybe comparing this to some other driver (linux?) but even better if we could get datasheets.

(2017-06-23 12:04)speleo14 Wrote:  I may be able to open a case with Apple engineering, but this will still need some time.

(2017-03-09 18:01)NiKiZe Wrote:  In that case I only think that boot ROM might be relevant.

Does any of these work with snponly.efi?

(2017-08-18 02:23)curtis.larsen Wrote:  After a little more debugging, it appears that the first reported error is in netdevice.c:net_rx(), where an unknown network protocol of 'aaaa' is received.

aaaa is 0101010101010101. That's too coincidental for me to be comfortable. Is that the pattern that uninitialized memory has?

I'm seeing this with
make bin-x86_64-efi/snponly.efi DEBUG=netdevice,nii EMBED=testscript.ipxe

(2018-05-28 17:18)NiKiZe Wrote:  I'm looking in to getting one machine with this problem, Could anyone provide exact model numbers on machines having this issue?