X710 network drivers

[Transce]

(2018-05-08 17:35)NiKiZe Wrote:  

(2018-05-08 01:32)Transce Wrote:  The offending driver in question is 0x8086, 0x1572. They are X710 10Gb SFP cards.

I thought it was just a Dell Proliant issue, but I just found out that gen 10 HPE Proliants are using them now.

Just to avoid any missunderstandings, iPXE does not currently have any native drivers for this nic. So it would make more sense to say that 8086:1572 is the offending device, an not driver

However, if you chainload over the network then you can use snponly.efi (assuming efi environment) or undionly.kpxe (if running in legacy pcbios mode)

In which environment are you running (efi/pcbios) and which buildtarget/ipxe binary are you using. And what do you see in regards to ifstat if you run above mentioned snponly.efi or undionly.kpxe?

So a little backstory... My company, for some reason, doesn't believe that we need DHCP/PXE. So I've created my own workaround to that for my physical server automation. I actually embed a custom bootloader script into an iPXE image to configure a static IP. It then kicks off initrd and kernel without actually chainloading. I know it's hacky, but it was working until I had to deal with these newer generation servers using the X710 hardware.

Now that I have these offending devices, I can't get a network connection. ifstat doesn't show the network devices. We figured out a workaround on Dell by adding:
PCI_ROM ( 0x8086, 0x1572, "x710", "X710-SFP", 0 ),
To the end of the device list in the intelx.c file. It does allow the devices to show up on ifstat, but I haven't been able to test the connections yet due to some other networking issues I'm trying to solve. But that trick seems to not work for the newer HPE servers. That's what I'm trying to solve.

Sorry for my novice knowledge, but is there a way to load the snponly.efi or undionly.kpxe via virtual cdrom/usb?