[gPXE] Fwd: [Etherboot-discuss] Some patches I'm using

[Marty Connor]

Here are some patches that might be worth looking at.

Comments and thoughts, please.

/ Marty /

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Etherboot-discuss] Some patches I'm using
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:46:11 -0400
From: Jarrod Johnson <jarrod.b.johnson at gmail.com>
To: etherboot-discuss at lists.sourceforge.net

In the interest of making sure gPXE proper benefits to the extent the
maintainers desire from what I do with gPXE, I'm going to paste links
to some patches I'm using and explanation:

https://xcat.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xcat/xcat-dep/trunk/gpxe/gpxe-0.9.7-kvmworkaround.patch
This is a simple insert of two nop instructions to work around a bug
in kvm emulation.  kvm has fixed this limitation in their 'devel'
releases, but I find them to be harmless, so I leave them in because
most KVM installs out there do not use their 'devel' modules.

https://xcat.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xcat/xcat-dep/trunk/gpxe/gpxe-0.9.7-registeriscsionpxe.patch
This patch adds the ability to set up an ISCSI drive, then PXE.  This
allows things like PXE booting WinPE and RHEL5.3 installer with an
IBFT to consult on how to set up software iSCSI.  I recognise that
most applications of this may be better done in other ways, but at
times, it is convenient.   I didn't make it configurable, but it may
be appropriate to hook it into the keep_san_setting if you actually
wanted it.  That's entirely a matter of opinion.

https://xcat.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xcat/xcat-dep/trunk/gpxe/gpxe-0.9.7-hdboot.patch
This adds a simple command to do int13 boot to 0x80.  I would have
made it take an argument, but the only function I found available to
do what I wanted in gPXE was strtoul, and it didn't work the first
time, and I was too lazy to try twice for something I didn't need.  If
someone wants this command and for it to take arguments, that would be
great.  Currently, I see it recommended to boot chain.c32, which seems
like overkill for such a trivial thing to do.  Note this still doesn't
quite have something that acts like pxelinux's 'localboot', so someone
might want that behavior (I thought 'exit' would do it, but some
systems enter an infinite PXE loop if gpxe exits, while they do not
with pxelinux localboot).  I don't have any explicit need for
localboot and actually like the hdboot behavior better than pxelinux
localboot for my purposes.

https://xcat.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xcat/xcat-dep/trunk/gpxe/gpxe-0.9.7-ignorepackets.patch
This patch causes gPXE to ignore unrecognized ICMP and TCP SYN
packets.  In general, this would be a bad thing, as gPXE is normally a
more proper participant in an IP network with the way it works today.
However, in trying to accomplish that good behavior, I've seen
problems at large scale.  The proper fix would be to try to determine
the reason why gPXE arp/tcp code can go off the rails, however it is
so hard to reproduce in a predictable way, and I am not good enough to
debug it anyway, so for me I just made it act as dumb as most boot
roms do in this context anyway, and the problems went away.  Some
monitoring applications receive no answer

Anyway, take whatever you like and ignore whatever you dislike.  Any
comments are welcome.

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