Realtek NIC (8169)

[Mark Brown]

Wonder if there is a way to support the RTL8169 chipset, for SPI based
programming. Very common and inexpensive card.

Would be wonderful to support something like gPXE/iPXE PXE ROMs on those
NICs. The typical 128kbit SPI rom/eprom/prom variations are often ATMEL
or like. e.f. ATMEL518 93C64

Marc

[Stefan Tauner]

On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 09:24:33 -0500
Mark Brown  wrote:
> Wonder if there is a way to support the RTL8169 chipset, for SPI based
> programming. Very common and inexpensive card.

we have an untested (probably outdated) patch for it:
http://patchwork.coreboot.org/patch/2489/
the problem is, that there are multiple versions of the chipset. the
earlier revision(s?) have a square package and would support reading
and writing to the flash (and eeprom) chip. the latter and by far more
common version of the chipset does no longer support writing to the
flash chip. if your card(s) have a square RTL8169 chip then i can
update the patch for you to try.
> Would be wonderful to support something like gPXE/iPXE PXE ROMs on those
> NICs. The typical 128kbit SPI rom/eprom/prom variations are often ATMEL
> or like. e.f. ATMEL518 93C64

please note that the chips with "93" in the name like above are eeproms
which are not supported at all by flashrom (please see
http://flashrom.org/Supported_hardware#Supported_chips to get a general
idea what series of memory devices can (easily) be supported).

[Mark Brown]

Stefan,

thanks for the clarification. I'd like to try the patch, will take a
look at the patch in a few days - I have mostly rectangular versions
(newer chip) but some board with older square versions, those are in use
right now however.

On a seperate note - does anyone have pointers to the packaging of
BIOS images - e.g. how to spot the boot/pxe code in the bigger picture?

Mark

On 3/10/2012 5:15 AM, Stefan Tauner wrote:
> On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 09:24:33 -0500
> Mark Brown  wrote:
> > Wonder if there is a way to support the RTL8169 chipset, for SPI based
> > programming. Very common and inexpensive card.
>
> we have an untested (probably outdated) patch for it:
> http://patchwork.coreboot.org/patch/2489/
> the problem is, that there are multiple versions of the chipset. the
> earlier revision(s?) have a square package and would support reading
> and writing to the flash (and eeprom) chip. the latter and by far more
> common version of the chipset does no longer support writing to the
> flash chip. if your card(s) have a square RTL8169 chip then i can
> update the patch for you to try.
> > Would be wonderful to support something like gPXE/iPXE PXE ROMs on those
> > NICs. The typical 128kbit SPI rom/eprom/prom variations are often ATMEL
> > or like. e.f. ATMEL518 93C64
>
> please note that the chips with "93" in the name like above are eeproms
> which are not supported at all by flashrom (please see
> http://flashrom.org/Supported_hardware#Supported_chips to get a general
> idea what series of memory devices can (easily) be supported).

[Stefan Tauner]

On Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:56:00 -0400
Mark Brown  wrote:
> On a seperate note - does anyone have pointers to the packaging of
> BIOS images - e.g. how to spot the boot/pxe code in the bigger picture?

looking at http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~libv/bios_extract is probably a
good first step ;)

if you have problems with the 8169 patch and can not figure them out
yourself, ping me and i'll update it.

[Michael Karcher]

Am Dienstag, den 13.03.2012, 02:07 +0100 schrieb Stefan Tauner:
> > On a seperate note - does anyone have pointers to the packaging of
> > BIOS images - e.g. how to spot the boot/pxe code in the bigger picture?
>
> looking at http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~libv/bios_extract is probably a
> good first step ;)

bios_extract works well for mainboard BIOSes from the three major BIOS
companies Award, AMI and Phoenix before EFI started to get common. But
bios_extract is not usefull for PCI option ROMs (like you find them on a
NIC, for example). The format of PCI option ROMs can be found for
example in the Appendix of the BIOS Boot Specification (which is
available copious times in the Internet).

Regards,
  Michael Karcher