iPXE shell not showing any interface after booting with ipxe.efi

[nswami]

After downloading the ipxe source code, built the ipxe.efi with "make bin-x86_64-efi/ipxe.efi" with a EMBEDDED script to drop to ipxe shell. When i look at "ifstat" it shows no interfaces. I've onboard Intel X550-T2 NIC in the system and looking at another post, the following is enabled in driver code.

PCI_ROM ( 0x8086, 0x1563, "x550t2", "X550-T2", 0 ),

I'm new to this iPXE stuff and intention is to build iPXE.efi to chain load the OS. Can someone pls help to build appropriate target to handle this ?

[NiKiZe]

If 8086:1563 truly is the pciid of your nic (please double check with linux and lspci -nn)
Then you should have the nic show up when you enter the iPXE shell and type ifstat.

What you can do is to build iPXE with DEBUG=intelx which should show any issues with the driver.
I would also recommend that you test for example bin/ipxe.usb and boot that in legacy mode, that way you can rule out EFI firmware issues if it works. Sometimes EFI refuses to release nic drivers or similar which could cause your the issue you are currently seeing.

another alternative is to try snponly.efi which tries to reuse the firmware driver for the nic instead of using the iPXE native one.

[nswami]

(2019-01-13 11:43)NiKiZe Wrote:  If 8086:1563 truly is the pciid of your nic (please double check with linux and lspci -nn)
Then you should have the nic show up when you enter the iPXE shell and type ifstat.

What you can do is to build iPXE with DEBUG=intelx which should show any issues with the driver.
I would also recommend that you test for example bin/ipxe.usb and boot that in legacy mode, that way you can rule out EFI firmware issues if it works. Sometimes EFI refuses to release nic drivers or similar which could cause your the issue you are currently seeing.

another alternative is to try snponly.efi which tries to reuse the firmware driver for the nic instead of using the iPXE native one.

Thanks much ! I've used snponly.efi and able to get the onboard nic showing up. Now hitting failure in the subsequent step where UEFI based Centos 7 boot, leads to initqueue failure with /dev/root does not exist. If I specify root in command line it leads to /sysroot failed to startup. For sure, i'm not doing something right. I dont have similar issue with legacy. I've searched this forum and other places and tried to accomodate the initrd part of the kernel command line etc, but still its failing.

kernel http://<ip>/vmlinuz-centos-7.5 initrd=initrd-centos-7.5.img ksdevice ks=<kickstart_file>

[NiKiZe]

Your posts is lacking full error messages, as well as full iPXE script.
you have initrd on the kernel line, that's good, do you also have initrd on it's own line so that the initrd is loaded?

Again test in pcbios mode which makes sure that we can rule out some EFI specific bugs

[nswami]

Pls find the error message snapshot attached.
1) I'm able to use the UEFI bios mode and load the same image with map drive or with a syslinux.efi

#!ipxe
dhcp
route
echo Hello World
sleep 5
initrd http://192.168.129.172/kickstart/initrd-centos-7.5.img
kernel http://192.168.129.172/kickstart/vmlinuz-centos-7.5 initrd=initrd-centos-7.5.img ksdevice ks=http://192.168.129.172/kickstart/centos-ipxe-efi
echo Done
sleep 5
boot

The files are getting download file and once it starts booting up, after the Intel NIC 10G network connection is done, its stalling and initqueue is timing out.

[NiKiZe]

efi map drive is from local disk, correct? if so that does not hold the nic interface in any way, so that might be relevant.
And I'm also assuming that is from EFI shell, and not Grub shell?

Note that the forum does not allow uploads, so if you tried to post an image you have to do that somewhere else.

When "initqueue is timing out" happens, do you get to a recovery shell?
If so does your NIC exist, does it have IP?
Have the vmlinuz-centos image been extracted correctly, or did it error out somehow?

[nswami]

Thanks again for your response. Yes the drive is local.

When I enter the shell, dhclient is able to get the address for interfaces. It just throws the error "could not boot" and warning /dev/root does not exist.

I'm possibly missing some command line options, but not sure what that is. Sorry, am new to this and not able to move forward.