[gPXE] gpxe exit command does not follow documented behavior

[Joshua Oreman]

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Nathan Mitchell <nmitchel at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> All,
>      Over the last few weeks we have been experimenting with gpxe and the
> ability to perform a local boot, ie falling back to the bios and letting it
> decide what the next step is.
>     The documentation from the gpxe command line
> reference, http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/commandline, says the following:
>
>             exit Exits gPXE, and passes boot control back to the BIOS, which
> generally attempts to boot the system using the next available boot method.
>
>     In my mind, this is exactly what a local boot should be. In our case, we
> are using the undionly.kpxe binary over pxe and we would like to, under
> certain circumstances, skip network booting and
>       boot from a local disk.  However, when the exit command is given, gpxe
> seems to exit and then a message appears that reads to the effect of:
>
>                    Please insert boot media and press a key.
> This is a slight paraphrasing, but the effect is clear - the system hangs
> until someone physically presses a key. At that point the boot process
> proceeds to the hard disk where we have grub installed.
>     My question is this: Is this message a result of gpxe or is it from the
> bios? Obviously the next boot device is bootable, or grub wouldn't load, so
> why does it need to ask me to continue so explicitly? Is there a
>     way to force the boot process to continue without needing human
> interaction? For a remote network boot scheme, it is just impossible to
> require manual intervention in the process, especially if the intervention
>     requires physical access to the machine.

gPXE does the best it can given the limitations of the BIOS. That
message is produced by your BIOS; it's the modern manifestation of the
old "Non-system disk or disk error".

I'm not sure if there are ways around it; perhaps someone else on this
list can offer better advice?

-- Josh

>      -- Nathan
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