[gPXE] gpxe exit command does not follow documented behavior

[Marty Connor]

Hi Nathan,

Could you try the undionly.kkpxe and see if it acts any differently?

I believe that variant of our UNDI driver may use different logic to 
exit back to the BIOS.

Please let us know how things go.  It would be nice to understand what 
is going on between your BIOS and gPXE.

Thanks,

/ Marty /

Nathan Mitchell wrote on 7/12/10 2:52 PM:
> 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.
>
> -- Nathan