iPXE iSCSI sanboot unreliable with 82573L at 1Gbit

[schubi]

Hello robinsmidsrod,

and thanks in advance for taken time for helping me

I compared two kinds of tcp dumps. There were tcp dumps were the iSCSI boot works perfectly, and the other tcp dumps where the Intel 82573L were used and the problem occured. At the "problem" dumps I could see that the last iSCSI read request were never fully executed. For example, there were 21 packtes transfered by the target to the client for a specific block address at a working client and only 5 packets at the Intel NIC. And after that 5 packets no further packets were transfered and of course the target closed the session after a time out.

I know that there is a shift from the iPXE stack to the Windows stack, but that shift is never reached when the problem occures.

Furthermore, since last night I was able to build a custom iPXE with the current iPXE version and the last "full" Intel driver pack, that was used by iPXE in branch 45e0327. I patched the Intel driver to use hard 100 Mbit half duplex. Yes, it's ugly But it's working perfectly now.

So, the quick answers to your questions.
1.) The boot fails before the Windows iSCSI client takes over. So, iPXE is still in place.
2.) After 15-20 minutes of no transfer an "unspecified I/O error" message is displayed.

At that moment, I'm preparing a debug environment. So, I will provide you more information as soon as I'm able to.
Furthermore, I will perform the driver tests as you recommended.

I will update as soon as possible.

Thanks again!