Broadcom Support

[bishop]

Are broadcom adapters supported, I have some servers and no network device is being detected. Based on some of the searching in this forum it seems that broadcom is not supported ?

[NiKiZe]

(2018-06-05 03:47)bishop Wrote:  Are broadcom adapters supported, I have some servers and no network device is being detected. Based on some of the searching in this forum it seems that broadcom is not supported ?

We are missing a few important pieces to be able to help you at all...

It depends on what you mean by "not supported"

Please always include the PCIID of the device, best way to grab it is usually in linux with lspci -nn, otherwise no one will be able to know which device you are actually using.

It is also important to include which binary you are using, since that tells us which drivers are built in. for example there is unidonly.kpxe, ipxe.pxe, ipxe.efi, snponly.efi, full list of buildtargets are available at https://ipxe.org/appnote/buildtargets so which one are you using?

Several Broadcom chips have native support in ipxe, some are in the tg3 driver. (And some are buggy when run on some systems, which a search on the forum for broadcom should tell, so what are you actually basing "Based on some of the searching in this forum it seems that broadcom is not supported" on?)
However depending on which binary of ipxe you are booting, this might not be relevant at all.

[bishop]

Hi

So the PCIID is 14e4:1639 which I do not see on the hardware list. This is the command I ran to create the iso -> make bin/ipxe.iso.

The research I have done on this forum so far, leads to be believe the if I need the bnx2 driver the ipxe solution is not going to work ??

Also I am using the most recent version of code.

[NiKiZe]

Indeed 14e4:1639 does not have any native driver in iPXE

how do you then start ipxe.iso?
if you can chainload over the network instead then you can use undionly.kpxe which will use the existing NIC ROMs UNDI stack to do communication instead.
or if you want EFI use snponly.efi or ipxe.efi and it might work via the SNP/NII driver mode instead (using the firmware driver for the NIC)

If this does not help you then you could add appropriate PCI_ROM line in the bnx2.c file, but might be several things missing in there to have it working right of the bat.
Let us know how it goes.

[Thegodoflife462]

I’ve encountered a very unpleasant surprise the other day, it appears that the network card Broadcom Net Extreme II BCM5709 (14e4:1639) on my Dell Power Edge 610 is not supported by iPXE. I’ve looked at the source code /src/drivers/net/bnx2.c and it appears that there is no driver support for this card.

To complicate things even more, I cannot change the mother board NIC nor I can add another PCI card.

Are there any plans to support this card at least basics?

[NiKiZe]

(2018-06-08 17:39)Thegodoflife462 Wrote:  I’ve encountered a very unpleasant surprise the other day, it appears that the network card Broadcom Net Extreme II BCM5709 (14e4:1639) on my Dell Power Edge 610 is not supported by iPXE. I’ve looked at the source code /src/drivers/net/bnx2.c and it appears that there is no driver support for this card.

Hi welcome to the forum, I moved your new post into an already existing and recent thread that is about the exact same device. Using the search function you should be able to find this so creating a new thread wouldn't have been needed.

As you can see from this existing thread, there is in "most" boot scenarios no need to have a native driver in iPXE for iPXE to be usable.
Please read this thread and see if it can help you, if not provide the information that is missing in your case, such as which iPXE binary you are using.

[bishop]

So I have done a little more fiddling, and come across some strange behavior. My NIC is an onboard quad port. If I enable network boot on any of the adapters cable connected or not, then iPXE is able to detect the card with the below details.
busid : 01:14:e4:16:39
busloc : 0x300
bustype: PCI
chip : undipci

I am using the ipxe.iso downloaded from the website. Any idea why this would be the case ?

[NiKiZe]

The ipxe.lkrn.tmp.map tells us that undi support is compiled in in this binary as well.
It is rare but does happen that PCBIOS installs the undi device driver even if it isn't used for booting.

That one device should be working.