iPXE iSCSI sanboot unreliable with 82573L at 1Gbit

[robinsmidsrod]

I'd like to understand exactly _when_ the iSCSI boot fails. Is it while iPXE is still in play, or is it after the Windows iSCSI client has taken over control (via the iBFT)? If that is the case, your Windows Intel driver might be having a problem taking over after iPXE for some reason. Are you using the latest version of the Intel NIC driver in Windows? Do you actually get any kind of error message, or are things just hanging?

If the last iSCSI traffic you see during boot is from iPXE then that is quite normal. iPXE iSCSI client will time out when Windows boots, because the Windows iSCSI client takes over and iPXE has no way to shut down cleanly. If you look clearly at the packet trace you should be able to find out if the iSCSI packets are coming from iPXE or Windows. You could enable DEBUG=intel,iscsi,scsi,int13 to try and figure out if iPXE is behaving strangely during its run stage. You should also try to run through the tests in http://ipxe.org/dev/driver to ensure the Intel NIC is actually well-behaved on its own.