HP NC7771 (tg3, 0e1100ca.rom) - very slow boot

[pedro77pl]

Hello there,

I have a severe issue with HP NC7771 adapter. The ISCSI disk registers with bios, the boot starts, but it seems as the adapter is only running at 10 mbit. It's crawling - XP takes half an hour to boot, then it's fine. I have yet to measure disk speed (ISCSI disk that is) after boot, but first impressions are that system is up to speed.

It's not a SAN / Network problem, as I have other PCs running well. Btw. the SAN uses the same adapter.

I tried gPXE, iPXE iso, iPXE rom build and burned into NIC. Same effect.

Any ideas how to debug?

[robinsmidsrod]

(2011-04-19 09:38)pedro77pl Wrote:  I have a severe issue with HP NC7771 adapter. The ISCSI disk registers with bios, the boot starts, but it seems as the adapter is only running at 10 mbit. It's crawling - XP takes half an hour to boot, then it's fine. I have yet to measure disk speed (ISCSI disk that is) after boot, but first impressions are that system is up to speed.

I seem to recall that this can happen because the traffic is going via your network gateway into your iscsi target because of some hardwired network setup on XP. You can do a packet trace with wireshark to see if this is your actual problem.

If it indeed is your problem, someone else might be able to chime in with a solution to it.

I also have to remind you that the tg3 driver is extremely slow. You should try to use undionly.kpxe to chainload from the vendor PXE. This gives me quite decent speed. I get approx. 8MB/s in diskperf in DOS with UNDI, approx. 250KB/s with tg3 driver.

[pedro77pl]

Ok I will. Using undionly is not an option due to DHCP server limitations.

[robinsmidsrod]

(2011-04-19 10:31)pedro77pl Wrote:  Ok I will. Using undionly is not an option due to DHCP server limitations.

You are aware that you can build ipxe with an embedded script, so that you don't need any other feature in the DHCP server than the ability to specify filename to undionly.kpxe?

Generally, it is done like this:

Code:

make bin/undionly.kpxe EMBEDDED_IMAGE=path/to/my_ipxe_script

my_ipxe_script should be a simple text file containing e.g. this:

Code:

#!ipxe
dhcp
chain http://some.server/path/to/other/nbp