[gPXE] Upgrading gPxe boot protocol from 2.07 to 2.08 ?

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 3:53 PM, Laurent Eschenauer
<laurent at eschenauer.be> wrote:
> Below is a kinda crazy idea that I'm working on, and I'm now stuck due to my
> gPxe kernel not having the 'boot protocol' >= 2.08. I'm not a kernel guru;
> so I hope someone on this list may have some ideas/pointers to move
> forward.
>
> The context:
> I'm trying to create an Amazon EC2 AMI that just boots a gPxe kernel which
> then chain to the EC2 user data to get its pxe configuration. This would
> enable to directly provision any kind of machine on EC2 using pxe, removing
> the hassle of building/uploading images. Kickstart based install also enable
> to customize the partition table, the packages, etc..
>
> What I did so far:
> EC2 (which is Xen based) enable to boot on custom kernels (using pv-grub).

I'm not sure this can ever work.  My Xen knowledge is small.  Can you
please confirm that there is a BIOS and a network interface supported
by gPXE inside the EC2 instance?

I suspect the guest may be paravirtualized with no BIOS and Xen pv
devices which gPXE does not support.  In other words, gPXE doesn't
support Xen's pv architecture (which is different from the regular x86
architecture).

Sorry, I don't have time to dig into this but it's a requirement
before it would even be worth trying to execute the gPXE image.

Stefan