PXE boot SPP missing driver for network card

[mhagen]

Hello,

We have problems with DL380 Gen9 LFF/SFF servers with  a 560FLR-SFP+ network card.

Booting SPP 2021.10 over PXE is also no issue, but uppon the ISO boot it tries to connect to the PXE server to retrieve the image. But it fails to detect the dual 10G 560FLR card.

What can we do to resolve this issue?

[support_s]

System recommended content:

1. Advisory: Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP) - PXE Booting SPP Version 2020.09.0 on an HPE Ethernet 10/25Gb 2-port 640FLR-SFP28 Adapter May Fail After the Initrd Image Loads

2. Advisory: (Revision) Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP) - 2016.10.0 SPP ISO PXE Boot Process Will Halt with the Message, "Warning!!! Unable to mount the file system"

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[Richard75]

Hi,

You can change the boot order in the RBSU. Or youy can press F11 during boot and select the ISO (CDROM) as boot device

[mhagen]

@Richard75 

Hi,

Please read.
It not the issue that SPP is not getting booted..

Edit 1:

The ISO is missing a drives or something. It doesn’t recognize the 10GE network card.
We use PXE to boot the SPP from the network with the following config as supplied by the ISO

kernel gen9spp2021100/vmlinuz
append initrd=gen9spp2021100/initrd.img media=net root=/dev/ram0 splash quiet hp_fibre showopts TYPE=AUTOMATIC AUTOPOWEROFFONSUCCESS=yes AUTOREBOOTONSUCCESS=yes iso1=http://@@http_server@@/cobbler/ks_mirror/HPe/spp2021.10.0/spp_2021.10.0.iso iso1mnt=/mnt/bootdevice

Again booting through PXE works fine, it loads the kickstart and downloads the vmlinux/initrd.img
So now we are booting that kernal and it tries to download the ISO image to mount.

In the vmlinux/initrd.img it is missing a driver of somesort, because it only shows 4 (the onboard) network nics
The 560FLR (dual 10G) is not seen, BUT it has already been used for PXE boot. So it is available and working.

This seems an issue with the SPP package itself.

Edit 2:
Also we only see this issue with 560FLR cards. The 530FLR-SFP+ works fine for a long time.

Edit 3:
Uppon enabling debug in the SPP package we observed issues with the ixgbe driver on load.

ixgbe: Unknown symbol xfrm_aead_get_byname (err -2)

Edit 4:

We have resolved this issue ourself.

1. Unpack the initrd.img to /tmp/initrd/
2. Download the latest "HPE Intel ixgbe Drivers for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15"
   (hp-ixgbe-kmp-default-5.13.4_k5.3.18_57-1.sles15sp3.x86_64.rpm in our case, the SPP is based on SUSE 5.3.18-57.3 kernal)
3. Unpack the RPM to grab the ixgbe.ko file (./lib/modules/5.3.18-57-default/updates/hp-ixgbe/ixgbe.ko)
4. Update lib/modules/5.3.18-57.3-default/kernel/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/ixgbe/ixgbe.ko with the new driver from the RPM.
5. repack /tmp/initrd/ to the initrd.img
   (find . 2>/dev/null | cpio -H newc -o -R root:root | xz -9 --format=lzma > /root/initrd_modified.img)
6. Use the new initrd to boot with PXE.
   The network card is now deteced, and no wierd "Unknown symbol" error on boot.

[NovoServe]

Coming too the newer SPP versions. This is still an issue. 
The 560FLR cards are not reconnized by the SPP and will not boot.

SPP Gen10 2023.03 and Gen10 2022.09 
SPP Gen9 2022.0822.4

We found:
mlx5_core: Unknown symbol psample_sample_packet (err -2)