Lenovo 300e ipxe boots ok but ipxe.efi can't resolve the system

[Sebastian Roth]

@mjaskowski Ok, I think we are down to the bones of this. Now we have to take one step back and also enable iPXE debugging to see what happens when the kernel quickly returns control to the UEFI firmware before it takes over for the rest of the boot process.

Please leave all the kernel source code as you have it right now as we might need to get back to that to implement a fix at some point.

Take a look at what is needed to compile iPXE here: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=IPXE#Compile

Beside the prerequisites you only need the following commands:

git clone git://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git ipxe-efi
cd ipxe-efi/src/config
rm console.h general.h settings.h
wget -O console.h "https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject/raw/master/src/ipxe/src-efi/config/console.h"
wget -O general.h "https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject/raw/master/src/ipxe/src-efi/config/general.h"
wget -O settings.h "https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject/raw/master/src/ipxe/src-efi/config/settings.h"
cd ..
wget -O ipxescript "https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject/raw/master/src/ipxe/src-efi/ipxescript"
make bin-x86_64-efi/ipxe.efi EMBED=ipxescript DEBUG=efi_wrap

Then install the new iPXE binary:

sudo -i
mv /tftpboot/ipxe.efi /tftpboot/ipxe.efi.orig
cp path/to/ipxe-efi/src/bin-x86_64-efi/ipxe.efi /tftpboot/ipxe.efi

Boot the machine and you should get some very funky colored output on screen (for example see here). Please take pictures of the output you get on the screen and post here. We need all the details you see!

[mjaskowski]

@Sebastian-Roth said in Lenovo 300e ipxe boots ok but ipxe.efi can't resolve the system:

@mjaskowski Ok, I think we are down to the bones of this. Now we have to take one step back and also enable iPXE debugging to see what happens when the kernel quickly returns control to the UEFI firmware before it takes over for the rest of the boot process.

Please leave all the kernel source code as you have it right now as we might need to get back to that to implement a fix at some point.

Take a look at what is needed to compile iPXE here: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=IPXE#Compile

Beside the prerequisites…

In doing the prerequisites I have the following roadblock:

[root@MCS-FOG ipxe]# git clone git://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git ipxe-bios
Cloning into ‘ipxe-bios’…
fatal: unable to connect to git.ipxe.org:
git.ipxe.org[0: 212.13.204.60]: errno=Connection timed out
git.ipxe.org[1: 2001:ba8:0:1d4::6950:5845]: errno=Network is unreachable

[Sebastian Roth]

@mjaskowski Try this: git clone https://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git ipxe-bios

[mjaskowski]

@Sebastian-Roth said in Lenovo 300e ipxe boots ok but ipxe.efi can't resolve the system:

Boot the machine and you should get some very funky colored output on screen (for example see here). Please take pictures of the output you get on the screen and post here. We need all the details you see!

[Sebastian Roth]

@mjaskowski Reading about “ExitBootServices” and “INVALID_PARAMETER” I found a few resources saying something about memory map being wrong:

https://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=32519
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-amd64/2019/09/06/msg003003.html
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2015-January/046956.html
https://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/ACPI_6_3_May16.pdf (p. 117,

Either it’s people developing their own operating system code and running into issues with their coding or it’s people running known operating systems that fail on particular hardware (probably because of UEFI firmware problems).

I am not sure if this is an issue that can be solved in iPXE but I will talk to the developers to see if they can help.

[mjaskowski]

@Sebastian-Roth said in Lenovo 300e ipxe boots ok but ipxe.efi can't resolve the system:

I am not sure if this is an issue that can be solved in iPXE but I will talk to the developers to see if they can help.

Argh! Thanks for all your help on this. I’ll see about getting Lenovo developers to cooperate or return their products.

[Sebastian Roth]

@mjaskowski Are there any firmware updates available for those devices?

EDIT: Just posted in the iPXE forum: http://forum.ipxe.org/showthread.php?tid=20820

[Sebastian Roth]

@mjaskowski Still not much of an answer. I posted to the iPXE mailing list now too. Should be soon in the archive: http://lists.ipxe.org/pipermail/ipxe-devel/2019-November/thread.html

Did you get any response from Lenovo yet?

[Sebastian Roth]

@mjaskowski I just remembered this and wanted to hear if you had any reply from Lenovo on this? No answer from iPXE developers mailing list unfortunately.

Have we talked about trying to boot this device using the USB boot method? Maybe it’s a good workaround for you to get around this. Take a look at this forum topic and let us know if you need help with it.

[tunatoksoz]

@Sebastian-Roth Hi Sebastian, I don’t use Fog project, but i use IPXE, and encountered this very issue myself. This is on a machine with elitegroup bios, and it has 2 nics.

I noticed couple things:

1. If i open BIOS setup screen, change nothing, but “save changes and exit” i do not see this issue.
2. If i open BIOS setup screen, change nothing, but “save changes and reset”, i get exit_boot failed error.
3. If i remove the nic that’s on pci, so i only am left with the one on motherboard, I do not see this issue.

Something with the memory map & nic card & kernel is a problem.

I am using similar script to this:
https://ipxe.org/appnote/debian_live

on debian buster.

Just in case this extra info helps.

[Sebastian Roth]

@tunatoksoz Hmmmm, thanks for joining the discussion here! Seems like you are making progress on this more than we have.

May I ask you if this is on Lenovo 300e as well? As you are saying yours has a build in NIC plus one on PCI I kind of doubt you have the same machine. Can you be more specific on what make and model you see the issue on?