Loading binary network driver

[chadparry]

Those are great suggestions. Thanks a ton! It worked great.

Quote:When you mention sanboot, are we talking about the iPXE command or some efi shell command? (sanboot is not available in iPXE when running in EFI mode)

I had tried "sanboot" from an iPXE shell. Since it's not going to work, I'll forget about that option.

Quote:ipxe has native support for most usb based nics.
try building it with make bin-x86_64-efi/ncm.efi and then use that file instead, it should remove the need for running load RtkUsbUndiDxe.efi
instead you should be able to just store ncm.efi as bootx64.efi

That would have been the most elegant solution. The ncm.efi image just hung, however. It displayed "iPXE initialising devices..." for at least 15 minutes before I rebooted. That didn't surprise me, since I had previously tried running "make bin-x86_64-efi/ipxe.efi" and copying that as my BOOTX64.EFI, and it complained about not finding any network devices, even though that image supposedly contains all supported drivers.

Quote:There is support for the file:// protocol within ipxe when running in efi mode, see: http://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git/commitdiff/9913a40

But I don't think that will work since ipxe must have a working driver available when starting, and there is no load RtkUsbUndiDxe.efi equivalent inside ipxe

I had high hopes that this might work, but you were right that it could not use the "file:" protocol without a network driver. It responded "Error: No such device" and "Error code 2c0480".

Quote:(note below that I'm assuming your board is a 64 bit intel arch, so you might have to adjust if it is not)

You are correct.

Quote:And another option is to create a startup.nsh file and put the 2 commands you normally run in there. (this is kind of described when you start the efi shell)

I had seen mentions of startup.nsh during the boot sequence, and I never realized that it was meant to be a customization point. So I created a startup.nsh file with the following contents:

Code:

load blk0:\EFI\BOOT\RtkUsbUndiDxe.efi
ipxe.efi

It performed an automatic netboot just how I wanted.