Dell 7010 Lenovo L530 with UEFI enabled, won't network boot.

[george1421]

Well this is either good or bad. I get the same results as Wayne using 7010 bios A18.

Not sure if this has any bering on anything. But I checked into the dhcp discover and the 7010s are sending out arch type 7. I noticed that there are two different arch types. One is 7 and one is 9. There is also a arch 6 for 32bit. I guess the question I have is what is the efi boot kernel that is being built?

Type Architecture Name
---- -----------------
0 Intel x86PC (BIOS pre-OS environment)
1 NEC/PC98
2 EFI Itanium
3 DEC Alpha
4 Arc x86
5 Intel Lean Client
6 EFI IA32 (UEFI 32 pre-OS environment)
7 EFI BC (UEFI 64 pre-OS environment)
8 EFI Xscale
9 EFI x86-64 (UEFI 64 pre-OS environment)

[Wayne Workman]

@george1421 A18 won’t work according to this: http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/SLN296756/EN

I’m using A12 for the record.

[george1421]

A18 will work as long as you turn off the legacy ROMS. I did see that post too, btw. I just had to try it and it worked with the same results as you. So no better or worse then.

[Sebastian Roth]

Is anyone keen to try another binary (different debug options)? I somehow feel that we are not getting anywhere with this…

[Wayne Workman]

@Sebastian-Roth Sure.

[Sebastian Roth]

According to this http://ipxe.org/7f45e082 the error should be happening within efi_utils.c… 0_1448292948783_ipxe.efi (DEBUG=efi_utils)

[Wayne Workman]

@Sebastian-Roth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsVUruALX8g

[Wayne Workman]

@Sebastian-Roth I noticed the very first two lines of output are unique.

I’ll try to get a clear picture of those.

[Wayne Workman]

@Sebastian-Roth This is as good as it’s going to get:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrEReJwsdJc

[george1421]

@Sebastian-Roth I have was able to capture the screen and uploaded it here (since this is the first time I tried this process, the relevant information is about 50% of the way through the video. And the video is quite large because of the cruddy codec I used. As they say better next time:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7t22wb4354njp56/1448293078345_ipxe_efi.avi?dl=0

One thing I noticed is your description 0_1448292948783_ipxe.efi did not match the downloaded file 1448293078345-ipxe.efi.

[Edit] FWIW this video doesn’t play well in VLC but it does in WIndows Media player. Sorry [/Edit]

[Sebastian Roth]

... is not a PCI device ... ??? Can you boot a live linux (in UEFI mode!) and see what you get from this command lspci | grep Ethernet

Can you get a clear readable picture of the first few lines? Would be interesting to see if there are different MAC and/or PCI addresses in that line…

[george1421]

This decidedly simple request has turned into a big PITA. I was able to boot the system with puppylinux but I think what I have on my flash drive is the 32 bit version. I’m downloading the 64 bit version to try to boot via cd in efi mode. Here is what I extracted from puppy linux in 32 bit mode with lspci -v
0_1448303778683_dell_7010b.txt

FWIW: The centos 7 rescue DVD (and centos 7) no longer uses lspci but pciutils (which is not available in rescue mode).

[Sebastian Roth]

Thanks a lot for the information and sorry for it being a quest! The output looks good to me (‘Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection’). Downloading the video right now. Will let you know if I find something new in there. I just posted the issue in the ipxe forums. Hopefully we can get some help from them too.

Now that you are talking about 32/64 bit I wonder if this might make any difference. Here is a 32 bit binary (DEBUG=efi_utils 0_1448307858655_ipxe32.efi

[george1421]

@Sebastian-Roth No luck with the 32 bit version. It starts to load and then just kicks back to the Dell UEFI boot menu. I’m going to have to work on this later tonight. I’m learning more about uefi than I care to right now.

For a uefi boot from cdrom or usb flash drive the system must detect the uefi bits on the media or it won’t boot. That is why I can’t boot puppy linux via the uefi menu.

[Sebastian Roth]

@george1421 said:

For a uefi boot from cdrom or usb flash drive the system must detect the uefi bits on the media or it won’t boot. That is why I can’t boot puppy linux via the uefi menu.

Yeah, that’s definitely tricky. I haven’t fully understood all this yet. I wonder if there is an UEFI capable ISO file from iPXE that we could try. Seams like someone has thought about this before us: http://lists.ipxe.org/pipermail/ipxe-devel/2015-April/004095.html (shall I try adding the patch and building an EFI ISO)?

[george1421]

@Sebastian-Roth

I’m trying to remember the history with these Dells. It was either the 7010 or the 9020 we got hung up on with Windows deployment because the WinPE 2.0 environment didn’t have the drivers for the nic. We needed to upgrade to the next WinPE environment for it to have the drivers.

IPXE boot iso. I think the rom-o-matic had the option to create an iso image as well as a usb image. Im just wondering if the e1000 driver doesn’t support this intel nic. I have an older/different intel nic in this box in an expansion slot and that must not support uefi booting because I can’t select that card. I’m going to work on the linux/FreeBSD booting in uefi mode later tonight. Maybe I can glean more info on what hardware is installed.

[Sebastian Roth]

@george1421 said:

IPXE boot iso. I think the rom-o-matic had the option to create an iso image as well as a usb image. Im just wondering if the e1000 driver doesn’t support this intel nic.

Thanks a lot for working on this! rom-o-matic does generate ISO and USB images but I am pretty sure those are BIOS only. As you can see here the intel 82579LM NIC (PCI 8068:1502) is included in a driver called ‘intel’ within iPXE. There is no e1000 in iPXE only eepro100 for other cards: http://ipxe.org/appnote/hardware_drivers
A little earlier in this thread I posted that one of our UEFI machines (Fujitsu) has the same NIC (identical PCI ID) and is working as expected with the native iPXE intel driver. So I guess this is more a UEFI/OptiPlex issue than a NIC issue.

[Sebastian Roth]

Booting iPXE from USB in UEFI mode seams to be easy. I just did that following those steps:

• format an unused USB stick with FAT32 (simple MBR partition layout is fine!)
• create folders \EFI\BOOT
• download my latest uploaded ipxe.efi binary and copy it to the USB stick as \EFI\BOOT\bootx64.efi
• plug USB stick to the machine and boot from USB

As you can see from the backslashes I prepared this on a windows machine. Can be done on any other system as well I reckon! Booting iPXE from that USB stick worked great on my Fujitsu UEFI PC!

[george1421]

@Sebastian-Roth said:

So I guess this is more a UEFI/OptiPlex issue than a NIC issue.

This is what I was thinking. While it might appear to be a nic issue, it could also be another component pre nic setup.

I have downloaded Ubuntu 15 and will try to install on this Dell. I tried yesterday with Centos 7 and it kept crashing. I’m suspecting that its the hard drive that I was trying to use (not wanting to mess up the existing install), I just grabbed a disk from my bench and tried to install.

When I get to work in 2 hours I’ll see what happens and update you.

[george1421]

Well trying to install centos 7 on a new out of box hard drive didn’t work I received the same error (something unknown happened). I might have an issue with the install media.

Taking a different approach, I downloaded and booting ubuntu 15.10 desktop. The installer had a live option so I booted successfully into that. I run zorin on my home laptop so I thought that ubuntu woudn’t be that foreign to me. Well, its kind of like traveling to the UK for holiday. (While we kind of speak the same language, there is just enough differences to get into trouble quick).

With that said here is the output of the lspci with different options.

lspci -vv (very verbose)
0_1448370335531_o7010vv.txt

lspci -k (kernel level drivers)
0_1448370353360_o7010k.txt

lspci -vn (verbose with hardware numbers and not names)
0_1448370383197_o7010n.txt