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ISA ROM initialization problem - Printable Version

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ISA ROM initialization problem - coredump4 - 2020-08-03 20:14

Awhile back, I was testing iPXE ne2k_isa images for use with an RTL8019AS-based ISA PnP NIC. This is a challenge, as you really need at least 64k for iPXE, but that's the outside boot ROM limit for many ISA NICs. I recently came back to this project and synced my branch from master before continuing.

The .dsk image worked fine when put on a floppy disk, but the .rom image won't initialize from the BROM chip. The card is jumpered for a 64kB ROM at address D000.

So I rebuilt with
Code:
DEBUG=init:3,ne2k_isa:3
hoping that would give me clues about what was going wrong. If I install the corresponding .dsk to floppy, I see debug messages and iPXE initializes. But when I burn the image to ROM and test with that, I don't get any debugging, not even the "Init" messages. iPXE reports failure as if debugging was never enabled:

Code:
iPXE starting execution...1B101B10 000D11B4 0001AD5C
Installation failed - cannot continue

Where should I go from here, if it's not able to get into the Init code? I had previously suspected it's not decompressing the image properly, and I think that still could be the case.

TIA

RE: ISA ROM initialization problem - mcb30 - 2020-08-06 13:31

Quote:
Code:
iPXE starting execution...1B101B10 000D11B4 0001AD5C
Installation failed - cannot continue

This error indicates that the CRC32 checksum failed when reading from the ROM image during initial installation.

It's probably worth testing that you can read back the ROM image (e.g. via sysfs) independently of iPXE, and that you get the expected content. My initial guess is that you may have the NIC jumpered for a 64kB ROM but with a smaller ROM actually installed in the socket.

Michael

RE: ISA ROM initialization problem - coredump4 - 2020-08-06 18:18

Thanks for the reply, you've given me a couple of things to think about and double-check.
Will report back what I find.