Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 18:35:36 -0400 (EDT) From: Daniel Feenberg <feenberg@nber.org> To: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com> Cc: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Network booting FreeBSD with gpxelinx almost works Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.64.1010061834360.19010@nber6.nber.org> In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1009252001260.87995@wonkity.com> References: <Pine.GSO.4.64.1009251809340.6663@nber6.nber.org> <alpine.BSF.2.00.1009252001260.87995@wonkity.com>
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On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Warren Block wrote: > On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Daniel Feenberg wrote: > >> We have been network booting FreeBSD for some time with pxeboot. So I am >> confident that we have the dhcpd.conf and the root filesystem sufficient >> for diskless booting. But now we would like to have menu of OSs to boot and >> got the idea somewhere that gpxelinux could do that for us. We copied >> gpxelinux.0 from the syslinux-4.02 distribution and replaced pxeboot with >> "gpxelinux" in the dhcpd.conf file. Indeed with a configuration file in >> pxelinux.cfg like this: >> >> default freebsd >> label freebsd >> PXE pxeboot >> >> and the root path still specified as a DHCP option, FreeBSD 8.1 does boot. >> If I replace the first line with: >> >> UI menu.c32 >> >> the client does display the menu and but if one hits return to select the >> single item offered the client merely hangs for a minute, then announces >> "boot failure". I am guessing that once the UI is interposed, somehow the >> root path isn't getting transmitted to pxeboot. > > 4.01 works, both with menu.c32 and vesamenu.c32. I can't say I've > experimented much farther, but used it when writing this: > > http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/pxe.html > >> All the other gpxelinux boot kernels seem to expect the information about >> the root filesystem to be specified in the pxelinux.cfg file, rather than >> in dhcpd.conf. > > FreeBSD's pxeboot isn't as versatile as others. > >> Does anyone have experience with this? FreeBSD isn't mentioned anywhere I >> can find in the syslinux or gpxelinux documentation, and the various web >> posting I have found linking FreeBSD to gpxelinux are all about do >> installations of iso files over the net. > > Yes, that's one of the reasons I wrote the article above. > We finally got the thing working - by simply dropping gpxelinux and using pxelinux instead. Daniel Feenberg
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