[Etherboot-developers] interesting thing I've noticed on E7500

[Eric W. Biederman]

Ronald G Minnich <rminnich at lanl.gov> writes:

> This is with fallback and normal LinuxBIOS images on E7500 mainboards.
> They're loaded with the identical etherboot image, 5.1.2rc4.eb5.
> 
> On fallback, etherboot goes right to the IDE disk after finding no good
> ethernet link:

[snip] 
 
> On normal, etherboot just loops forever until I tell it to go to disk:

[snip]

It is a bug.  And it is fixed in the etherboot source tree.  Ron for
your cluster I just need to make a new build of LinuxBIOS and put the
new etherboot in there.  The boot order code was just broken, and I
don't know how it lasted as long as it did.

Ron can you check to see what your boot order is.
As I recall it only happened with
boot_first=Network
boot_second=Network
boot_third=Network

In which case there is a work around available.  I need to track this
down before we start building up Pink.

> I'm guessing I'm not the first person who will hit this, hence this
> message to various lists.

The code was fixed a little while ago, when I completed the e1000
support.  As the bug also it prevented fail over from one nic to
another.

Eric