[gPXE] Transfer speed with e1000 and pcnet32 in VMware

[Shao Miller]

Joakim Schicht wrote:
> You can read about how to boot a full XP from...

Thanks.

> I have not yet dived into iSCSI booting, but will soon do. Btw, is 
> that possible to boot over WAN? Is your setup documented anywhere?

AoE is a SAN protocol which doesn't use IP, and is restricted to an 
Ethernet broadcast domain.  iSCSI uses IP and is thus routable.  
Assuming all routers and firewall rules allow port 3260 (or some other 
port of your choosing), you can certainly iSCSI-boot across the Internet.

My setup is quite simple.  I use IETD to serve the SAN (iSCSI target) on 
some Knoppix 3.4 box.  All workstations PXE-boot to a PXELINUX menu.  
One of the menu.c32 config-file options is:

LABEL ramxp
  PXE ramxp.0

where ramxp.0 is actually 'make EMBEDDED_IMAGE=ramxp.gpxe 
bin/undionly.kkpxe' and ramxp.gpxe is:

#!gpxe
ifopen net0
sleep 5
dhcp net0
sanboot iscsi:ctrl.mydomain.com::::ctrl:ramxp

where the SAN is a simple 300 MB HDD image with one FAT32 partition with 
SYSLINUX installed.  The contents are:

/ldlinux.sys
/syslinux.cfg
/memdisk
/RamXP.HDD

where syslinux.cfg is simply:

DEFAULT ramxp
LABEL ramxp
  KERNEL memdisk
  APPEND raw
  INITRD RamXP.HDD

It loads quite reasonably quickly.  HTTPDisk is a another, different 
option and is an experimental SAN protocol not in gPXE proper, but 
performance seems pretty poor; caching might improve this someday.

> Btw, I am the same Joakim that tested your winvblock driver a few 
> months ago.

I thought you might be.  Cool. :)  We can thank V. for the majority of 
the work in WinVBlock, which derives from V.'s WinAoE.

- Shao Miller
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