[Etherboot-developers] New Myricom 10Gb Ethernet NIC driver works, but...

[Glenn B. <gl...@my...>]

We make a 10Gb Ethernet PCI Express NIC, and I've ported our Linux 
driver to Etherboot.  I send a big "Thank you" to the Etherboot team. It 
works perfectly on this machine:
     WinFast NFP1K8AA motherboard
     Phoenix - Award Workstation BIOS
     Nvidia nForce Pro 2200/2050 chipset
     AMD Opteron 242, 512 MB

Now the gritty part: Etherboot apparently hangs in the Etherboot BEV 
code on a slightly different machine:
     Tyan S2895 (Thunder K8WE) motherboard
         http://www.tyan.com/support/html/b_s2895.html
     Phoenix TrustedCore Server BIOS
     Nvidia nForce Pro 2200/2050 chipset
     AMD Opteron 2600MHz , 512MB

The machine boots fine without an Etherboot ROM, or with an Etherboot 
ROM with non-matching device/vendor ID in the PCI header, so ROM reading 
is apparently not the problem.  It hangs even if I make my driver's 
.probe entry point immediately return 0, and even if I make Etherboot's 
main() immediately return 255, so the problem seems to be during 
Etherboot's early bootstrapping.  I've tried -DCONFIG_x86_64 in 
src/arch/i386/Config.  I've tried every BIOS option I can think of.  PXE 
boot over the NVIDIA Boot Agent and the built-in NICs works fine, ruling 
out most motherboard HW problems.  Our NIC works fine in the machine 
under Linux and WinXP.  I've got the latest BIOS flashed.

So, does anyone have suggestions on how to isolate problems in the x86 
preboot assembly?  Any other ideas?  Could StrongROM/TrustedCore be
the problem?

---

And one unrelated question:

I use allot()/forget() to allocate a big chunk of RAM (~2MB) for
my driver.  Is this OK?  I note that no other NIC driver does
it, but our driver wants more RAM that the linker will allow to
be statically allocated.

Thanks for any help,
--Glenn