[gPXE] etherboot and WDS

[Marty Connor]

James,

Glad to hear you were able to get things to work!

Would you be interested|willing to update our wiki with your experience?

You could add a a short appnote here:

      http://etherboot.org/wiki/appnotes

    You could explain your problem, and show a diff -u of the patch(es)
    you used to solve your problem.

    I think it would make a nice little article.

You could also update our generic qemu information here:

    http://etherboot.org/wiki/qemu

Your patch may well help other RHEL 5.4 or QEMU users, and I'd like to 
get it searchable :)

Thanks again for working with us on this issue, and I hope gPXE helps 
you do whatever it is you're doing. :)

Marty

James wrote on 1/15/10 10:40 PM:
> Following up my own message...
>
> I was able to reverse the prompting and reducing the timeout to zero
> eliminated the prompting altogether. It is now working as desired
> with the qemu pcbios. I can select the boot device either through
> qemu configuration or the pcbios F12 boot menu and the preferred
> device is booted.
>
> Oh, there was that one other problem with gPXE I experienced with
> the RTL8139 10ec:8139 version not getting the correct MAC address
> from the hardware. Thread started 18-Dec-09. Though, I haven't
> seen it again yet with the images I'm compiling myself from the
> git sources. 0.9.9+.
>
> Thanks all,
> James
>
>
> On 15-Jan-10 16:22 James wrote:
>>
>> On 15-Jan-10 14:26 Marty Connor wrote:
>>> James wrote on 1/15/10 5:12 PM:
>>>> On 15-Jan-10 12:00 Marty Connor wrote:
>>>>> James wrote on 1/15/10 12:53 PM:
>>>> I'm currently in a sticky situation. I have problems adopting gPXE
>>>> because it doesn't work well with the Bochs BIOS that ships with
>>>> qemu 0.9.1. Updating qemu to 0.12 isn't an option so that leaves me
>>>> to either figure out what it will take to patch qemu to use SeaBIOS,
>>>> fix Etherboot to work with WDS, or hack gPXE to behave more like
>>>> Etherboot when identifying qemu's Bochs BIOS as PnP capable.
>>>> Etherboot hooks in fine but gPXE uses int 19h.
>>> I'm guessing that getting gPXE to not print the prompt and wait for
>>> input would not be too hard to do.
>>>
>>> Even if there is a small private patch you need to apply, it might
>>> make your life easier. Perhaps we can conditionalize somehow.
>>>
>> This is the approach I am currently investigating. I can reduce the
>> BANNER_TIMEOUT to 0 and change the prompt so that it defaults to NOT
>> boot from network instead. Then make it read the preferred/selected boot
>> device loaded into the IPL boot table at 0x0084. I'm not so good
>> at x86 assembly programming so this is my tripping point. I would
>> probably
>> also want to eliminate the CTRL-B prompt for configuring gPXE.
>>
>>> Besides the prompt, are there any other things that gPXE is doing
>>> that are problematic for you? We'd like to help you migrate if we can.
>>>
>> Nothing else I've identified at this time.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> James
>>
>>> If there is a little bit of funding we might get one of our core devs
>>> interested in helping with a patch. Feel free to email me privately
>>> to chat about that.
>>>
>>> I'm hopeful we can find a solution that meets your needs and helps
>>> you use gPXE.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Marty
>>>
>>>
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