Network card survey

[rwcr]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm working on extending the mature Open Source netbooting firmware gPXE (formerly Etherboot) to work on Intel Macs. The primary impediment is currently driver support, and especially the fact that I don't know what drivers are used by networking hardware in any Mac except the 2006 white MacBook I own. If you could follow the instructions below to get info on the networking hardware for your own Mac, and post it as a reply, that would be an immense help in deciding which drivers I need to work on.

 

These instructions will only work using Leopard, but if you're tech-savvy and can figure out how to get the PCI IDs with Tiger or a Linux livecd, that's great too :-)

 

I need the PCI IDs, which are not normally exposed as part of the OS X interface, so there's a special tool you need to download. Go to this forum post and download "pciutils_osx_installer 1.03.zip" as linked at the bottom of the main post. Install it.

 

Now open Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal). You'll see a bunch of text ending with a line like "yourcomputername:~ yourusername$ " and a blinking cursor. Type or copy-and-paste the following, and press Enter.

 

lspci -nn | egrep 'Network|Ethernet'

 

You should get one or two lines of output - mine are as follows - and be given another $ prompt.

 

01:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8053 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller [11ab:4362] (rev 22)
02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5418 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless PCI Express Adapter [168c:0024] (rev 01)

 

Copy-and-paste those lines of output from Terminal into a reply here, and give some information about the type of Mac you did it on. Back in Terminal, type "exit" and press Enter; then you can quit the application.

 

Thanks for your help!

 

-- Josh

[Guest pcharles25]

03:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller [10ec:8168] (rev 02)

[eval]

Hi,

 

i have exactly the same network card as Josh.

 

I'm pretty interested in gPXE (etherboot) in Macs. I have been reading about and following the steps tha appears at the official site.

 

I have a Mac Mini with Ubuntu 8.10. When I try to build my own ROM image (make bin/11ab4362) i get the error: undefined symbol 'obj_11ab4362'. It seems that there is not still support for this network card in the latest version of etherboot...

 

I need to perform a dump of the PXE of my network card too, can i do it with gPXE?

 

Josh, could you please tell me how to get the 11ab4362 support?

 

Thanks!

[ludacrisvp]

Hardware Overview:

 

Model Name: Mac Pro

Model Identifier: MacPro3,1

Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon

Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz

Number Of Processors: 2

Total Number Of Cores: 8

L2 Cache (per processor): 12 MB

Memory: 10 GB

Bus Speed: 1.6 GHz

Boot ROM Version: MP31.006C.B05

 

 

07:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 80003ES2LAN Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper) [8086:1096] (rev 01)

07:00.1 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 80003ES2LAN Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper) [8086:1096] (rev 01)

0d:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation AirPort Extreme [14e4:4328] (rev 03)

[rwcr]

03:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller [10ec:8168] (rev 02)

 

Thanks. That card is supported by the r8169 driver, which is already in gPXE. Could you tell me what type of Mac you have that uses that card?

 

I have a Mac Mini with Ubuntu 8.10. When I try to build my own ROM image (make bin/11ab4362) i get the error: undefined symbol 'obj_11ab4362'. It seems that there is not still support for this network card in the latest version of etherboot...

 

I need to perform a dump of the PXE of my network card too, can i do it with gPXE?

 

Josh, could you please tell me how to get the 11ab4362 support?

 

The 11ab:4362 card is a Marvell Yukon-2, which uses the sky2 driver - that's what I'm working on, but it's not yet supported in gPXE. I'll post here once my port is complete, working, and hopefully accepted into mainline.

 

For the record, another Mac mini I had the chance to test, and a friend's newer "Santa Rosa" MacBook, both used an nVidia nForce card, which is *probably* supported by the "forcedeth" driver.

 

Hardware Overview:

 

Model Name: Mac Pro

Model Identifier: MacPro3,1

Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon

Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz

Number Of Processors: 2

Total Number Of Cores: 8

L2 Cache (per processor): 12 MB

Memory: 10 GB

Bus Speed: 1.6 GHz

Boot ROM Version: MP31.006C.B05

07:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 80003ES2LAN Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper) [8086:1096] (rev 01)

07:00.1 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 80003ES2LAN Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper) [8086:1096] (rev 01)

0d:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation AirPort Extreme [14e4:4328] (rev 03)

 

Thanks for the info! This one is supported by the "e1000" driver in gPXE.

 

-- Josh

[jbbjshlws]

Hello Josh!

I work for a high school and i can get the details you require for the 2008 aluminum imac, the 2007 white imac and the 2008 macbook. funny coincidence, my name is Joshua and i also have the 2006 MacBook!

 

What i am trying to achieve is pxe booting to all of these machines, but firstly i want to achieve a pxe boot on my laptop. i went to http://rom-o-matic.net to create a pxe rom for my mac, but i was unsure of what R8169 NIC to choose out of:

 

r8169:00018168 -- [0001,8168]

r8169:10ec8129 -- [10ec,8129]

r8169:10ec8136 -- [10ec,8136]

r8169:10ec8167 -- [10ec,8167]

r8169:10ec8168 -- [10ec,8168]

r8169:10ec8169 -- [10ec,8169]

r8169:11864300 -- [1186,4300]

r8169:1259c107 -- [1259,c107]

r8169:16ec0116 -- [16ec,0116]

r8169:17371032 -- [1737,1032]

r8169:rtl8169-0x0116 -- [16ec,0116]

r8169:rtl8169-0x1032 -- [1737,1032]

r8169:rtl8169-0x4300 -- [1186,4300]

r8169:rtl8169-0x8129 -- [10ec,8129]

r8169:rtl8169-0x8136 -- [10ec,8136]

r8169:rtl8169-0x8167 -- [10ec,8167]

r8169:rtl8169-0x8168 -- [0001,8168]

r8169:rtl8169-0x8168 -- [10ec,8168]

r8169:rtl8169-0x8169 -- [10ec,8169]

r8169:rtl8169-0xc107 -- [1259,c107]

 

As all of these are R8169, what is the best one to choose and how do you tell the difference?

 

Also i want to create a disk that will allow a pxeboot for all of the Mac's at the high school, do you have any infomation on multiple drivers on a single disk for pxe booting?

 

Cheers,

Joshua

[jbbjshlws]

Bump Bump, still not sure on the correct one to use, any clues?

[rwcr]

Sorry about the delay in replying, it appears my spam filter decided "Topic Subscription Reply" amounted to worthless email... sigh. Hopefully I can help with the PXE stuff :-)

 

Hello Josh!

I work for a high school and i can get the details you require for the 2008 aluminum imac, the 2007 white imac and the 2008 macbook. funny coincidence, my name is Joshua and i also have the 2006 MacBook!

 

What i am trying to achieve is pxe booting to all of these machines, but firstly i want to achieve a pxe boot on my laptop. i went to http://rom-o-matic.net to create a pxe rom for my mac, but i was unsure of what R8169 NIC to choose out of:

 

[snip long list]

 

As all of these are R8169, what is the best one to choose and how do you tell the difference?

 

Using the lspci method that I mentioned in the original post of this thread, the line for your network card will have something at the end showing the PC vendor:device IDs, like [10ec:8068]. Pick the corresponding entry from the ROM list - the "10ec,8068" one in this example.

 

Be aware that those images are ROM images, though, and you'd best have a way to flash them. There's probably a tool distributed by Realtek that can do it, but you might have to dig a little to figure out how; check http://etherboot.org/ or the etherboot-discuss mailing list for possible help. If you can't burn the ROM, you can make a tiny partition on the hard drive and use the method described by http://etherboot.org/wiki/macbuild - it says "driver support is not there yet" in reference to the sky2 driver, but if you have an r8169 card you should be fine.

 

Also i want to create a disk that will allow a pxeboot for all of the Mac's at the high school, do you have any infomation on multiple drivers on a single disk for pxe booting?

 

That one's easy - download the gPXE source code and do "make bin/gpxe.iso". If you don't have a development environment set up, let me know and I can compile it for you. That'll create an ISO image containing all drivers currently supported. If you look in the etherboot-developers list archives, you should find a patch by me (Joshua Oreman) to add sky2 support for the 2006 MacBook as well. It hasn't been incorporated into the mainline branch yet, but hopefully it should be soon :-)

 

-- Josh

[jbbjshlws]

Hello Josh,

ok i used pciutils to find out what network adaptor model i had, and it was exactly the same as yours:

 

01:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8053 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller [11ab:4362] (rev 22)
02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5418 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless PCI Express Adapter [168c:0024] (rev 01)

 

I will run this same scan over the network of 100~ macs on Thursday and see what the others have and post back the export from RDP, this way you have a very detailed list of the network cards that are in all of them. I plan to create a netboot image with the needed info for the macs to then pxe boot to a ubuntu install (for no other reason than to see if i can...).

 

I made a mistake originally when i was looking at the driver in use (picked the one used by parallels)

 

So i will have to wait for the sky2 driver from you before i can pxe boot the macbook, is this correct?

 

Cheers,

Joshua

[jbbjshlws]

Hello,

 

More Network Details:

BUS, CPU Clock, CPU Type, Machine Model
1.07 GHz	2.4 GHz	Intel Core 2 Duo	iMac8,1
04:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation Unknown device [14e4:4328] (rev 05)
05:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Unknown device [11ab:436a] (rev 13)

BUS, CPU Clock, CPU Type, Machine Model
667 MHz	2 GHz	Intel Core 2 Duo	iMac
02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8053 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller [11ab:4362] (rev 22)
03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation Unknown device [14e4:4328] (rev 01)

 

I will get more as i have time,

 

Cheers,

[rwcr]

Thanks for the info!

 

The sky2 driver is complete, but it won't be in the gPXE codebase until it's tested and reviewed by the gPXE developers. In the meantime, you can get the patch from http://www.get-linux.org/~oremanj/t/sky2-v2.patch and apply it to a gPXE git checkout, to get a gPXE that works with sky2 cards.

 

-- Josh