Posts made by mckayj

@george1421 I managed to find a PCIe network card in an old server on its way to the junk heap. Salvaged that, and placed it in the node in question. iPXE worked fine with it.
So, I guess the moral of the story is some super new network cards iPXE can’t talk to.

@Sebastian-Roth They are managed switches, but pretty much all settings are in their defaults - and, I’m not really familiar with with Spanning Trees, or how to set them up with these switches.
I can however confirm that the network cards are linking up, and that the first stage DHCP for PXE gets an address.

@george1421 I have tried ipxe.pxe, ipxe.kpxe, and ipxe.kkpxe, as well as some of the Intel, Realtek, and UNDIonly variants.
None work, all refusing to see the Ethernet network card
(And, the Intel and Realtek ones won’t see the Infiniband card either, but that doesn’t really matter)

Thanks for the speedy response.

I believe the network cards are booting the old BIOS mode (They are set to “Legacy” in system setup. If I change them to “EFI”, it works even less well).

The boot image is set to ipxe.pxe, although I’ve tried several different files. None work better.

I’m pretty sure the iPXE is starting:
PXE starts and gets and address, then the normal startup messages for iPXE print.
But when it normally (on other computers) says that it is configuring net1, it just says DHCP fails.

Screen shot:

Looking at the screen shot, you can see the standard network boot, and DHCP, and then it switching to iPXE.
iPXE then tries net0, however this is our Infiniband network, not our Ethernet network, so it can be ignored.
It then fails.
I can then run the ifstat utility, and it only shows the Infiniband, no other network cards.

All our other nodes have both Infiniband as well as Ethernet, and they work fine; the iPXE uses “net1”.

Hope this helps.

We have purchased a SuperMicro 4029GP-TRT to be used for scientific computing.
We are using FOG to distribute our OS image, and have had no problems with other computers (except issues that were previously resolved on this forum).
However, this 4029 refuses to boot the iPXE. Here is what happens:
-Computer starts, and starts to boot PXE.
-PXE gets DHCP address, then switches to iPXE.
-iPXE does not get an address, fails, and reboots after 10 seconds.
It seems the iPXE simply doesn’t recognize the network card.

More details:
When iPXE fails, I can select “s” to enter a minimal shell. If I enter the command “ifstat”, it does not show the Ethernet network card.
-(It shows our Infiniband network card, but we’re not booting over that.)
I have tried changing the ipxe image selected by the DHCP server to all the other files provided for PXE. None of them work.
The network card is an on-board adapter, from the Intel C622 chipset.

This is a pretty new system, and a 10gig network card.
Has anyone seen this before?

Thank you

@Quazz
IT WORKED! Thank you!
The ATOM based node started and went into it’s debug task, and is able to see the network (I was concerned about the network as well, as some slightly older Linux distributions couldn’t see the network cards)
We also tested it on a KNL based node, and two Xeon based nodes, and they can all use the Kernel fine.

So, I am curious to know: why isn’t that Kernel feature enabled all the time?

Also, do you guys have any merchandise or swag? We’d like to support you, but a donation may be difficult from within our company’s various structures.

Again, thank you so much!

(Screen shot of ATOM based node in “debug” task)

@Sebastian-Roth
I have downloaded and tried Ubuntu 18.04.1 on Live CD as requested.
It works completely OK!
Systems starts, goes into GUI, and network cards all work.

I’m hoping the Kernel with x2apic support will help, as I have seen messages about that with some kernels, and some options.
The computers in question have options in their BIOS menu that appear to be for that, but the options are not available to be changed.

@Quazz
I tried a number of self boot Linux CDs:

• UBCD (Parted Magic): OK, no network
• Ubuntu 16.04: OK, no network
• CentOS 7.5: OK (This is currently installed on the computer’s own HDD, and will be reinstalled once FOG is running)
• Puppy 5.3.3: Failed (Can’t load drivers for USB, so not the same issue), but not a Kernel Panic
• Damn Small Linux: Non responsive Black Screen
• Ubuntu 8.04: Kernel Panic: Attempted to kill init!
• CentOS 6.7 Live: Kernel Panic
• CentOS 7.5 Installer: OK (After all, I installed it from this on this computer a few months ago)
• Scientific Linux 48 (Very old): Kernel Panic: Oops

(Screen shots below)

SHIFT+PAGEUP scrolls a working terminal, but once the kernel panics, that doesn’t work.

To be honest, I have not tried this on every node, as this is a running cluster, so I can’t take too many nodes offline for this testing. Here nodes I have tried:

• ATOM Node (which I’ve mostly been talking about): Kernel Panic
• KNL Node: Kernel Panic
• Xeon CPU (HP brand computer): OK
• Xeon CPU (Supermicro brand computer): OK
• Various desktops, laptops, virtual computers: OK

Ubuntu 8.04:

CentOS 6.7 Live:

Scientific Linux 48 (Not sure about that version number, that’s just what was written on the CD):

Thank you for the quick response!
I set the ATOM based node in question to use the kernel you linked to me.
While it did make some difference, the difference is limited to some of the HEX numbers being a different value, and the order of things printed is changed:

Certainly nothing I can read.

We have a small cluster at our company.
We are looking at using FOG to deploy Linux to the compute notes of the cluster.
We have had success (so far) with all systems we’ve tried that contain a “conventional” Xeon CPU.
However, we also have some more unusual CPU architectures we need to cover.
For the computers we’ve tried with ATOM CPUs, and systems with Xeon Phi Knights Landing (KNL) CPUs, we get a kernel panic just as the FOG Kernel is starting. PXE and file transfers are all working correctly as near as we can tell.
Here is a screen shot of the panic screen (ATOM CPU, but the KNL nodes do the same thing):

We have already tried updating the Kernel to the newest version.
We have also tried several different kernel arguments; only “nolapic” did anything, which only changed the panic to “BIOS has enabled x2apic but kernel doesn’t support x2apic, please disable x2apic in BIOS” (Which isn’t an option available in these systems)

Info:
FOG Version: 1.5.4
Default Kernel: 4.16.6
Target system is a SuperMicro A2SDi-16C-HLN4F (In the case of the ATOM computer).

Thank you in advance for any help.