[gPXE-devel] snponly.efi functionality

[Geoff Lywood]

As far as booting ESXi directly on EFI goes, we're working on it, but it is not a feature generally available in any current release. For now, most EFI machines have some kind of compatibility mode that allows them to act like BIOS machines, and you can use that (in combination with syslinux/pxelinux/grub/whatever) to boot multiboot operating systems.

There are a number of technical problems with the multiboot specification itself that make it difficult or impossible to use directly on EFI: for example, the OS will be unable to find the ACPI tables, and therefore won't know how to set up device interrupts, leading to catastrophic failure. It looks like GRUB 2 supports something they're calling "multiboot 2," which I assume overcomes those technical limitations. It would require OS changes, though, and I haven't really been keeping up to date on that front.

Geoff


________________________________
From: Jarrod Johnson [mailto:jarrod.b.johnson at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2010 6:01 AM
To: Geoff Lywood
Cc: oremanj at gmail.com; gpxe-devel-bounces at etherboot.org; gpxe-devel at etherboot.org
Subject: Re: [gPXE-devel] snponly.efi functionality

Hmm, any takers for a mkefi to wrap linux images?  I'm not smart enough myself...

Also, how about booting esxi (or any multiboot image for that matter) via EFI?
On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 6:14 PM, Geoff Lywood <glywood at vmware.com<mailto:glywood at vmware.com>> wrote:
snponly.efi doesn't really add anything currently. Some time ago, I sent around a patch that would allow other EFI applications to use gPXE's network stack and all of the protocols it supports. However, the patch was never integrated, and the elilo side of the code was never written.

Your idea of bundling the kernel/initrd/elilo into a single EFI app sounds neat. It's basically an mknbi command for EFI. I don't believe that anyone has actually implemented something like this, though.

Geoff


________________________________
From: gpxe-devel-bounces at etherboot.org<mailto:gpxe-devel-bounces at etherboot.org> [mailto:gpxe-devel-bounces at etherboot.org<mailto:gpxe-devel-bounces at etherboot.org>] On Behalf Of Jarrod Johnson
Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2010 12:54 PM
To: oremanj at gmail.com<mailto:oremanj at gmail.com>
Cc: gpxe-devel-bounces at etherboot.org<mailto:gpxe-devel-bounces at etherboot.org>; gpxe-devel at etherboot.org<mailto:gpxe-devel at etherboot.org>
Subject: Re: [gPXE-devel] snponly.efi functionality

Would snponly.efi add anything versus booting elilo directly?  e.g., even if I use snponly.efi, won't elilo tftp down the kernel/initrd, or is there some way to bundle a kernel/initrd/elilo into a single efi, or have elilo use enhanced protocol while running under gPXE a la pxelinux?
On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 3:46 PM, <oremanj at gmail.com<mailto:oremanj at gmail.com>> wrote:
No, but you can use ELILO as an intermediary.

Josh
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-----Original Message-----
From: Jarrod Johnson <jarrod.b.johnson+gpxe at gmail.com<mailto:jarrod.b.johnson%2Bgpxe at gmail.com>>
Sender: gpxe-devel-bounces at etherboot.org<mailto:gpxe-devel-bounces at etherboot.org>
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2010 15:37:40
To: <gpxe-devel at etherboot.org<mailto:gpxe-devel at etherboot.org>>
Subject: [gPXE-devel] snponly.efi functionality

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