USB devices not working in EFI mode anymore

[NiKiZe]

(2017-02-08 10:45)eugenio Wrote:  We need to use the USB support provided by iPXE.
Our product use the grub embedded into iPXE to load one or another OS depending on the USB devices detected by iPXE.

We see that when we load Windows 7 the USB keyboard attached to the system does not work, so the user can not select an option to for example use the Windows safe boot mode.

We think that USB stack implemented into iPXE turns on a bit on the USB host controller to acquire ownership of the USB host controller hardware. By turning on this bit iPXE disables the BIOS support for USB keyboards. I think that a solution will be to return ownership of the host controller hardware to the BIOS by calling the ehci_remove function of the EHCI driver in the case of a EHCI host controller.

For iPXE to have access to USB devices in anything faster then ~10Mbit/s it must load it's own drivers, that means that any firmware loaded USB support is thrown out and iPXE adds it own, USB NICs and keyboard is supported. When iPXE exits all devices and buses are again released, and I don't think there is any way to actually get the EFI firmware to again reload the USB devices. I'm now informed that in EFI it should return cleanly to the firmware so there should be no issue.

So there is no "fix" for your windows menu keyboard issue other then not having USB support in the ipxe build.
Not quite sure which issue you are having since this should work in EFI.
Could you maybe provide the exact make command that you use to create this version of iPXE that you are having issues with (including the filename that you are then booting)

Why use grub or a windows boot menu when this can be implemented as a menu inside of iPXE?
As a workaround, boot ipxe.efi that has ipxeusb.efi embeded and only chain to that if no nic is found on the PCI bus, and then add a note that keyboard will temporarily be dead in this case, but then again the iPXE based menu should be able to serve as a fix instead.

I will however point mcb30 to this post, hopefully he will get some other ideas or tips. (see my edits above)