[gPXE] gpxe user confusion

[D. Bahi]

On 05/26/2010 04:28 PM, Joshua Oreman wrote:
> On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 12:38 PM, das_deniz <dhbahi at gmail.com> wrote:

... snip ...

>>
>> to sum up our new points of confusion:
>>
>> 1) if we're chaining, as described here, http://etherboot.org/wiki/pxechaining,
>> and not burning gPXE ROMs for NICs, are we always using the UNDI
>> driver ?
> 
> Yes. Booting with undionly.kpxe or undionly.kkpxe boots a gPXE with an
> UNDI driver only (hence the name).

despite the name, when it builds it builds the whole ball of wax. and
when we first started using gPXE via the rom-o-matic (brilliant by the
way) we'd use an "include everything" image...

clearly we weren't thinking clearly.

> 
>> 2) we're building an embedded gpxe script into our image much like
>> what is available in syslinux gpxe sources.
>>
>>    make -C src bin/undionly.kkpxe NO_WERROR=1 EMBEDDED_IMAGE=../
>> pxelinux.gpxe,../../core/pxelinux.0
>>

... snip ...

> That's undionly too. kkpxe versus kpxe makes no difference with
> respect to keep-san; the only differences are that kkpxe uses slightly
> more memory, may work on some systems where kpxe doesn't (or vice
> versa) due to vendor PXE bugs, and allows you to say "set use-cached
> 1" before DHCP in order to avoid performing another DHCP request.

that use-cached trick was interesting - got us past the dhcp net0 hang
with the networking info from the orig PXEBOOT req/reply

> Have you tried saying "ifstat" after the timed-out DHCP (see if the RX

- but the network just didn't work - would report TX but nothing went
out - so no RX...

> count is nonzero), or compiling with DEBUG=dhcp? Both would be useful
> in figuring out what's going wrong.

and debug only showed 4 trys before failing the same way.

We were only able to investigate this and have the confidence to flip
over to a 'kpxe' image to try because of shao's and your suggestions

thank you again.

still the variability of either kpxe or kkpxe working in some cases one
or the other ... feels bad.

> -- Josh
> 

db

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