Booting from ROM crashes after ipxe.iso runs with timeout

[farpoint]

A certain boot sequence always results in system crashes or freezes. In my case I was using E1000 network card with QEMU emulator and KVM. The guest was trying to boot with empty hard disk and CD-ROM image of ipxe.iso. The problem happens when DHCP server is not yet ready (or it does not provide boot file, etc.), so that after timeout, the BIOS falls back to ROM boot (which happens to be pxe-e1000.rom file in QEMU project) and there it crashes after displaying this message:

IPXE (PCI xx:xx:x) starting execution...

This crash apparently does not happen in two other cases:

1. Booting from ipxe.iso image when no rom image is supplied (i.e. pxe-e1000.rom file is missing or is not installed).
2. Booting without ipxe.iso image and with pxe-e1000.rom present.

In my opinion, running ipxe.iso code renders ROM boot unusable and results in guest code eventually to jump to code which looks like long sequence of zeroes.

In addition to the said above, I've previously seen some posts on the net complaining about crashes with pxe-e1000.rom and QEMU/KVM. Also, as additional information, I was using the most recent version of ipxe sources and different versions of QEMU (old and new ones) to verify that.

I'm not familiar well with this project. Any thoughts or (better) quick fixes would be welcome. A quick workaround would be like this : if using CDROM image, hide the pxe-e1000.rom file (and don't hide it when no CDROM image is given).

Thank you.