Mac Mini EFI > PXE > Ubuntu LTSP?

[charlescva]

My assignment is to get the Mac Minis to boot as thin clients for Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTSP. I have made some progress by doing the following:

Install a Mac OS Partition on a thumbdrive with rEFIt. http://refit.sourceforge.net/
Place an MSDOS FAT partition on the same thumbdrive with iPXE. http://ipxe.org/download

This actually allowed me to utilize the rEFIt bootloader and start the SYSLINUX image pointing at the iPXE kernel.

However, no network card was found.

So I got the Device and Vendor ID from the Broadcom 57766-A1:
Vendor ID: 0x14e4
Device ID: 0x1686

And added it to the file: /ipxe/src/drivers/net/tg3/tg3.c

Which looks something like this:

static struct pci_device_id tg3_nics[] = {
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x1644, "14e4-1644", "14e4-1644", 0),
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x1645, "14e4-1645", "14e4-1645", 0),
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x1646, "14e4-1646", "14e4-1646", 0),
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x1647, "14e4-1647", "14e4-1647", 0),
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x1648, "14e4-1648", "14e4-1648", 0),
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x164d, "14e4-164d", "14e4-164d", 0),
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x1653, "14e4-1653", "14e4-1653", 0),
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x1654, "14e4-1654", "14e4-1654", 0),
PCI_ROM(0x14e4, 0x165d, "14e4-165d", "14e4-165d", 0),

Recompiled the kernel and a rEFIt -> iPXE boot actually got the Link up on the network card and I can see the requests in the DHCP server logs. However, the iPXE command: ifstat shows 0 RX and 0 RXE. As if the response packets are not being captured. At this point I am dead in the water.


So,

My question is. How do I get these Mac Minis to perform a PXE boot of the Ubuntu LTSP 12.04.4 thin client? Any help would be appreciated.