UEFI Boot Looping While Initializing Devices

[real]

Hello,

I am running a test server, attempting to boot both BIOS and EFI clients. My test client is a Dell Optiplex 9010. I can serve and boot to undionly.kpxe exactly as expected, but, when I boot to any of the efi binaries that I'm aware of (ipxe.efi, snponly.efi, realtek.efi, snp.efi), it fails.

With all of the above mentioned except realtek.efi, the boot hangs at "iPXE initializing devices" with iPXE attempting and failing to start NII and SNP drivers in an infinite loop, as shown in the included picture. When searching for answers for this, I find a somewhat related post here: http://forum.ipxe.org/showthread.php?tid=7877.

When I boot with the realtek binary, it immediately loads and displays the Ctrl-B prompt reports "No network devices" and sends me back to the boot menu.

Thanks for your time,
real

[NiKiZe]

So what is your nic? use lspci -nn in linux to get device identifiers and it's name.

If your nic isn't pci based realtek then it makes perfect sense that the realtek.efi don't find anything.

[real]

(2018-11-10 09:04)NiKiZe Wrote:  So what is your nic? use lspci -nn in linux to get device identifiers and it's name.

If your nic isn't pci based realtek then it makes perfect sense that the realtek.efi don't find anything.

I'm not surprised either, but I was trying all the binaries I'm aware of and wanted to be comprehensive with my description. I am more concerned about getting any EFI working at all.

The network card in the client is an Intel 82570LM.

Thanks,
real

[real]

I found another post about this issue. It seems to be something with ipxe failing to kill Dell UEFI drivers and load its own?

https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/1103...0-hangs/21

[NiKiZe]

(2018-12-04 21:16)real Wrote:  I found another post about this issue. It seems to be something with ipxe failing to kill Dell UEFI drivers and load its own?

https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/1103...0-hangs/21

Ah, Report to DELL and ask them for a non broken firmware.

[peek]

(2018-12-04 21:19)NiKiZe Wrote:  Ah, Report to DELL and ask them for a non broken firmware.

Good luck on that approach !

The amount of issues I've encountered with PXE and/on IPv6 is ... insane.

Chainloading is the "quick 'n easy" solution, yet very dependent on IPv4 and TFTP, not excluding the vendors' "issues".

Flashing iPXE to the NIC would surely be the professional (and least time consuming) approach as to a more solid solution.

However, how does one "flash" / integrate iPXE efirom's on onboard NICs, such as the Intel NUC range ?

---

Very simple test I've used quite a few times to try different EFI's on difficult machines:

Copy the iPXE EFIROM i.e. "ipxe.efi" to a thumb drive formated FAT32.

Start the particular machine's Internal UEFI Shell.

Type "map -r" to list devices.

With only a USB drive attached, you can expect the drive to be "fs0"

Type "fs0:" to access the drive

Type "ls" to list the drives contents

Type "ipxe.efi" to execute the iPXE EFIROM from the thumb drive.

Depending on the rest of your setup, this could get a stubborn machine going....